Wyc Grousbeck and his family may have just sold the Boston Celtics to Bill Chisholm and his investors for a record $6.1 billion. Grousbeck will remain as team governor and work with the new owners through 2028.
That has raised one big question: The Boston Celtics are about to get historically expensive, are Chisholm and his team going to pay up to keep a championship team together? Next season, the Celtics’ payroll is expected to be around $230 million — they have $225 million on the books without re-signing Al Horford or Luke Kornet, both free agents — and that would bring a luxury tax bill of around $270 million, or a total of $500 million to keep this contending roster together? Will the new owners pay that?
The question isn’t the money, it’s the second apron basketball penalties that will keep Boston from living above the tax line, Grousbeck said during a recent WEEI appearance.
“It’s not the luxury tax bill, it’s the basketball penalties. The new CBA was designed by the league to stop teams from going crazy. They decided that it’s not good enough to go after the wallets because the fans can be like, ‘Hey find someone who can afford to spend $500 million dollars a year or whatever it is, like the English Premier League…
“The basketball penalties mean that it’s even more of a premium now to have your basketball general manager be brilliant and lucky. Because you have to navigate because you can’t stay in the second apron, nobody will, I predict, for the next 40 years of the CBA, no one is going to stay in the second apron more than two years.”
Grousbeck speaks the truth. What are those restrictions? Second apron teams cannot:
• Aggregate salaries in trades, they can only send out one player (plus picks)
• Take back more salary than they send out in a trade,
• Send cash in trades
• Use the midlevel exception
• Make a sign-and-trade deal
• Cannot sign anyone on the buyout market who made more than the mid-level exception
• Cannot trade its ts first-round draft pick seven years into the future (2032 for Boston this summer). If a team is over the second apron for two of the following four years after that (or three of five), then said pick drops to the end of the first round (regardless of where the team falls in the standings).
The second apron restrictions make team building nearly impossible, and it’s one of the reasons the Clippers and Warriors — two teams with ownership more than willing to spend to win — dropped below that apron this season.
Grousbeck went out of his way in the interview to praise Brad Stevens, but how the Celtics executive is going to get this team below that tax line is not easy to envision. Next season Jayson Tatum will make $54.1 million as his new max deal kicks in, Jaylen Brown will make $53.1 million, Jrue Holiday is at $32.4 million, Kristaps Porzingis at $30.7 million and Derrick White at $28.1 million. There will be no easy cuts.
Just don’t expect the Celtics to spend that freely. The second apron is not a hard cap, but for the foreseeable future, it’s going to act like one.
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