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Two Celtics among The Athletic’s 38 best trade targets for the 2022 NBA trade deadline

justin quinn
·4 min read

The Boston Celtics are likely looking to make moves ahead of the 2022 NBA trade deadline and with that in mind, more than a handful of analysts and front offices both are trying to value what the best players the team has available that could reasonably be pried loose to improve another roster.

Sam Vecenie, Seth Partnow, and Danny Leroux of The Athletic got together and did exactly this for the entire league, and a pair of Celtics made the list of what the panel deems as “the players who might move at the deadline who could most impact the remainder of this season, as well as position teams for the future.”

The trio looked at the “player’s impact should he be traded, our evaluation of the likelihood of a trade occurring, the “asset value” of the player on his current contract and the level of compensation likely demanded by the player’s current team as part of the swap,” so let’s see how they view this pair of Celtics on the trade market.

No. 26 - Dennis Schroder

“It would probably be unfair to call Dennis Schröder’s one-year contract with Boston this offseason a failure,” notes the panel. “He’s largely done what should be expected of him”.

“He’s just good enough to score points and create offense without actually having much of an impact on the bottom line of wins and losses. He’s essentially an innings-eater at the guard spot at this point in his career. Innings eaters have value. They’re good enough to play and good enough to be a part of useful lineups. But if you’re counting on him to be an integral part of your team and start/close games, you’re probably overextending him and asking him to do too much. He’s on an expiring deal worth $5.9 million. Maybe the Celtics keep him, or maybe they decide to move him to another team.”

“The Celtics do need to keep the little offense they have, but they probably need more of a shooting infusion than the shot creation Schröder brings,” they add sagely, in our estimation.

No. 11 - Marcus Smart

“The 27-year-old signed a four-year extension last offseason, but that may actually make him more desirable to some teams because roughly $20 million per season for a solid starter is reasonable even in the current climate,” shared the panel.

“That said, Boston has been much better recently, with Marcus Smart playing an integral role in the team figuring things out a bit more on offense. His return over the last six games has coincided with the team winning five of them, as Smart has focused more on being a distributor for the offense, averaging nearly seven assists per contest. Given that the Celtics want to win, it seems unlikely the team moves Smart unless it’s in a big deal that could allow them to entirely reshape the roster.”

“Those deals tend to come more in the offseason, though, so while Smart’s name has certainly been bandied about in the trade market, we’d be surprised to see him move at this point,” suggest the three authors.

Notable omissions

The trio of Athletic analysts did not rank Al Horford nor Josh Richardson, perhaps — by their rubric — signaling their belief that neither would be dealt, which makes sense given J-Rich’s improved play of late and Horford’s solid everything but shooting in recent games.

Whatever path the franchise takes, we won’t have long to see the results, with the moratorium to exchange players arriving on Thursday, Feb. 10 at 3:01 pm ET.

This post originally appeared on Celtics Wire. Follow us on Facebook!

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