Luke Kornet is among the numerous former Celtics for whom the team will need to prepare some sort of welcome back to Boston presentation in the not-too-distant future.
Luke Kornet is among the numerous former Celtics for whom the team will need to prepare some sort of welcome back to Boston presentation in the not-too-distant future.Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff
A few scattered thoughts on the unfortunately revamped Celtics while wondering if No. 42 goes to the rafters someday.
⋅ Here’s one of the truths that has become evident as a team which did everything right in building its championship core suffers through becoming the first systematically dismantled by the cruel parameters of the collective bargaining agreement.
Very, very few championship-contending teams will be allowed to have a learning curve going forward.
That’s too bad, because one of the most satisfying aspects of caring about a team is watching players — in the Celtics’ case, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown — mature into champions. The runway is so short that there isn’t going to be any room or time for the seasons of ups and downs and ebbs and flows and lessons learned from near-misses that usually precede becoming a champion. In the Celtics’ case, pretty much everything from, oh, 2021 until the confetti finally fell in June 2024.
Just consider the Pacers, one of the most enjoyable teams in years, who, in the wake of Tyrese Haliburton’s injury, are already shedding pieces and will never be the same.
There’s a perception that the champion Thunder will be exempt from this because of all of the assets and depth general manager Sam Presti has accumulated, but I don’t know. Paying Shai Gilgeous-Alexander $71 million per season does not seem conducive to keeping the whole band together in the long term.
The taxman is going to come for everyone in some way, and sooner than most teams can anticipate.
⋅ I’ve mentioned this in a couple postmortem columns already, but it bears reiterating because I don’t think it is being said enough.
Because the Celtics are suffering through the roster bloodletting now, it should — especially if they get out of the tax altogether in the coming season — put them in an advantageous position when other teams are in that roster-paring mode a couple of years down the road.
Of course, that does nothing for our entertainment purposes in the coming season, but a gap year is easier to endure with the knowledge that Brad Stevens is the person making the decisions. He’s deserving of complete and total trust when it comes to navigating all of this and eventually rebuilding the roster.
He’s made it clear in his matter-of-fact way that the core is Tatum, Brown, Derrick White, and Payton Pritchard. He’s clearly prioritizing players that play hard — first-round pick Hugo González, Luka Garza, Josh Minott — to fill out the edges of the roster this season. (I’ll be surprised if talented but defense-averse Anfernee Simons spends anything close to a full season with the Celtics, especially given the need to shed more salary.)
The best outcome for the coming season? Tatum returns for a few games just to shake off the cobwebs and learn to trust his first step again, Brown and White get plenty of rest along the way, Baylor Scheierman develops, González crashes around the court Nesmith-style, the Celtics end up at the back end of the lottery, and they get the kind of luck that Nico Harrison absolutely did not deserve this year.
⋅ During Stevens’s eight-year tenure as Celtics coach, his greatest superpower was getting the most out of compelling, but clearly flawed players.
As irrefutable evidence, I present to you mad gunner Jordan Crawford winning an NBA Player of the Week award in December 2013. (Honorable mention: Evan Turner playing so well for the Celtics in 2015-16 that the Blazers gave him a $70 million deal.)
I’m curious whether Joe Mazzulla has this in him. He’s done a fine job coaching the stars and established veterans, but he has an established low tolerance for rookies and young players — and their inevitable mistakes. He’s going to have to soften his demands, find some patience, and figure out how to get the best out of Neemias Queta — can the Celtics petition the league to allow him eight fouls per game? — and Scheierman, among others.
⋅ The Celtics’ in-arena production team probably should get started on all of the tribute videos they’ll have to put together for popular players returning to the Garden as a visitor this season.
The latest 2024 champ to move on was Luke Kornet, who got a well deserved four-year, $41 million deal with the Spurs, which should be a perfect fit.
Enjoy 26 minutes of barking and buckets from Luke Kornet ☘️ pic.twitter.com/lEO8eY17PR
— Boston Celtics (@celtics) May 27, 2025
We don’t have to wait for the regular season to offer our appreciation, of course, and so let’s salute Kornet for everything that he was: a superb teammate with a genuinely funny sense of humor (if he ever decides to go into broadcasting, better watch your back, Scal); a major player-development success story for the organization (in 2021-22, he played 15 NBA games across three different teams); and a player who knew his role and mastered it to the best of his ability. Turns out his second-to-last game as a Celtic, when he blocked seven shots against the Knicks in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference semifinals, was his best.
Who could have known back when he was battling Moe Wagner for a roster spot that he would join the Beloved Celtics Role Player pantheon?
And “sure will miss that guy” has become the sentence of the summer, huh?
Chad Finn can be reached at chad.finn@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeChadFinn.