Two Max, or not Two Max? Celtics face difficult roster decisions originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston
As the Boston Celtics plot what the core of their next title team might look like, the pursuit of any marquee talent on the trade market doesn’t necessarily answer the biggest question facing the team.
Is it still feasible to have two max-money superstars as the long-term centerpiece of a championship roster?
Whether it’s leaning into the familiar superstar tandem of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, or any new-look superstar duo as rumors swirl about Boston’s potential pursuit of Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Celtics are navigating the math problems created by a prohibitive new collective bargaining agreement.
The Celtics already felt the CBA squeeze last summer. Boston got ahead of the crunch and delivered the 2024 title season by building a deep and expensive roster. The team is now paying the late fees on that splurge, not in dollars but in diminished depth. Boston had to watch key pieces from that title team walk away, and traded others, to shimmy down off the second apron last summer.
The Celtics can reset the pesky repeater penalties that make sustained spending nearly impossible by staying out of the luxury tax again this season. That’s a rather annoying hurdle for a team that has superstar players in their prime and yearns to build the best core around them immediately. Stomaching two max contracts — and putting a strong cast around them — becomes easier in the two years after the reset button is hit, but the new CBA is setting up a cycle where it’s basically impossible to splurge for more than those two seasons (teams pay the steep repeater rates for being in the luxury tax in three of four consecutive seasons).
Before last summer’s teardown, the Celtics were staring at a projected $540 million roster cost. Brad Stevens won Executive of the Year, as voted by his peers, in large part due to maintaining a competitive team despite chopping over $350 million off the books.
And while Boston’s younger players thrived throughout the 2025-26 season, and the team displayed unexpected depth while finishing second in the East, the absence of those veteran players was accentuated as Boston came unglued and kicked away a 3-1 series lead against Philadelphia in Round 1 of the Eastern Conference playoffs.
That delivered the Celtics to this latest offseason crossroads. For the better part of the past half-decade, it’s been a no-brainer decision to build the best possible team around the Jays core. Now, Boston has to ponder if that’s still the most prudent path.
Roster building gets a lot more complicated when two players account for 70 percent of the salary cap.
The question becomes, in what feels like a new parity era of basketball, are teams better off building around one big-money star? And are the most valuable players in the league now the superstars that only command, say, 25 or 30 percent of the cap?
The spotlight on roster building is brighter now in the aftermath of the Knicks’ title season. New York has one max-money player in Karl-Anthony Towns, who commands 34.6 percent of the cap next season. Jalen Brunson only accounts for 22.9 percent of the cap after agreeing to a team-friendly extension in 2024 that could have been far more lucrative if he had waited another season.
Brunson has been celebrated for giving the Knicks financial flexibility, though his decision had plenty of other factors — including injury risk management and the potential to get back to the table and negotiate a true max deal sooner. Undeniably, Brunson’s lower salary has allowed the Knicks to build out a deep roster with OG Anunoby (25.8 percent of the cap next season) and Mikal Bridges (20.3 percent of the cap next season) also on reasonable deals. The Knicks swung big on those two trades and were rewarded.
New York will start to feel the squeeze of the tax moving forward, particularly if it yearns to keep all the pieces of its championship core. But the construct of the team this past season begs the question of money allocation.
Which brings us back to the Celtics. It’s somewhat maddening that Boston built a homegrown core and is essentially being penalized for those players becoming All-NBA talent. The league should take measures in future CBAs to limit the tax penalties on teams that draft and develop. But that’s not going to solve the current roster riddle.
Neither does trading for someone like Antetokounmpo. The presence of any two max-contract players leaves the Celtics tiptoeing around the tax line this season. They could potentially scale above the tax to start the year, assess their title chances, and plan to dip back below the tax line before season’s end.
But the reality is that Boston — and the rest of the league as well — is now limited in how it can build around two stars, and teams are going to ride a wave of spending to avoid apron penalties and brutal tax bills.
Whether the Celtics keep the Jays core, or pursue Antetokounmpo or any other max-money star, they will be banking heavily on internal development of younger players. Guys like Neemias Queta, Baylor Scheierman, Hugo Gonzalez, and Jordan Walsh might need to make another leap beyond the large strides made last season and greatly outkick the value of their current contracts. There are tougher choices about the futures of players like Derrick White (18.4 percent of the cap next season) and Sam Hauser (even at only 6.6 percent of the cap next season).
The Celtics have access to both the mid-level exception and a big-money traded player exception that could allow them to add impact talent this summer. But just how much they can spend must be balanced against the need to avoid the tax again. It’s a funky jigsaw puzzle, but one that won’t get easier to solve until next summer.
No one wants to wait, though. Not with the Jays in their prime. Not with Tatum healthier after missing much of last season while rehabbing from an Achilles tear. Not with the Knicks parading around Manhattan with their first title in a half century.
The Celtics have intriguing choices to make this summer. So much of the attention will fall on the names of potential pursuits, especially given the megawatt star power of someone like Antetokounmpo. But this puzzle is bigger than that one piece. It’d be a lot easier to make that sort of move if the Celtics were in position to spend big to maximize what might be a limited window of a player on the backside of his career.
Boston’s path back to title contention hinges heavily on figuring out a math problem that the entire NBA doesn’t quite have an answer to yet.
