Last year it was a tough time to be a Celtics fan. All you heard was casuals and talking heads coming out of the woodwork to criticize the team for shedding salary and saving money without realizing the true implications. And to be clear, I’m not totally blaming them. The NBA CBA and the different apron penalties have become incredibly complex and tough to follow.
Optically, it looked like the Celtics were tearing apart a championship team just to avoid paying taxes. That was partly true, but only told a small portion of the story. Boston was above the second apron and deep into the repeater tax and would have been completely stuck with roster building, with zero flexibility to change the team, future draft picks frozen, and they’d be paying almost $5 for every $1 over the tax.
Sadly, it wasn’t feasible for them to retain their players, financially or in terms of roster-building. The Celtics were the first team to really face this crunch, so as the test guinea pigs, they took the brunt of criticism, getting out ahead of these penalties, but if you were paying attention, you knew they were the first of many and would be far from the last.
And sure enough, one summer later, we are seeing that same crunch come for other teams. The Thunder haven’t even had their big star extensions kick in yet, and they’ve already had to salary dump Lu Dort, Isaiah Joe, and Aaron Wiggins this summer, but we’re really seeing the aprons and the tax come for the Nuggets.
Nuggets in major trouble thanks to financial crunch
The Nuggets have kept their big three of Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray, and Aaron Gordon together as long as anyone, but they’re starting to pay the price. The team is right up against the second apron with just nine rostered players. They’ve already lost multiple key bench players in free agency, and they have Peyton Watson and Spencer Jones unsigned in restricted free agency.
And while they could just pay everyone and go way over the apron, that would leave them in a spot to make no moves, with a roster that may not even be good enough to contend, and with a tax bill that would be well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Not happening.
So you’re seeing teams poach away their talent piece by piece, with OKC signing Jones to an offer sheet on Saturday that will be tough for Denver to match. They still need to figure out a plan for Watson and will likely have to dump a starter like Cam Johnson just to make the money work.
It’s a dire situation and one that could spell doom for the rest of the Jokic era. They don’t have a lot of options now, and while in many ways they’ve mismanaged assets and should have planned better, it’s largely a result of the current CBA, which is something the Celtics know all too well. People got mad at Brad Stevens for getting out in front of it, but as the years go by and teams get torn apart with no rebuilding plan, Stevens and the Celtics are only going to look smarter.
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