Should Fans Care About Ducking The Luxury Tax? (daily Topic)

Boston, MA - November 26: Bill Chisholm, the new owner of the Boston Celtics, is photographed at TD Garden before the team's game against the Detroit Pistons on November 26, 2025. (Photo by Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) | Boston Globe via Getty Images

By now we’ve covered and reacted to all the trades and cap machinations that Brad Stevens (and Mike Zarren and the rest of the front office) were able to pull off this week. You’ve seen the graphics already, showing that before the offseason the owners were on track to pay the GDP of Spain in luxury taxes and now it is just a few measly millions. At some point the numbers are so ridiculous that they don’t even make logical sense. But at the end of the day, this is a business and it has to matter to someone. But should it matter to us?

Let’s start with an important point. After the Simons trade, the Celtics had gotten under both the 2nd and 1st aprons. That meant that nearly all the basketball maneuvering penalties were lifted. No frozen picks, no restrictions on trades, just normal operating rules. I think there were still some restrictions on which buyout guys they could sign but I’m not sure how much that would have mattered.

Still, the front office decided that they were close enough to duck the tax entirely, and moved a bunch of players that weren’t playing anyway in order to get under it. In that light, what they did was remarkable and saved the owners in both the short and potentially long term. But again, should we care?

Here’s a little more context for what they accomplished from Yossi Gozlan:

Second, and more importantly, they are one step closer to resetting their luxury tax repealer clock. Teams that are luxury taxpayers in three of the four previous seasons are designated repeat taxpayers. They have to pay $2 more per tax level than standard taxpayers, resulting in more punitive tax penalties. As an example, if the Celtics were standard taxpayers this season, their $283 million tax penalty shown above would be $193 million.

The Celtics need to avoid the luxury tax both in 2025-26 and 2026-27 to reset their repeater clock. Doing so would make them standard taxpayers from 2027-28, when Tatum will be two years removed from his injury, through 2029-30. This would give the Celtics a three-year window at the end of the decade to blow past the aprons and spend as much as possible. That is their true window to compete for a championship, not now.

What it seems to boil down to is this. At some point, the tax penalties are so great that it makes billionaire owners cringe. It is a soft cap. So making these moves now likely makes it more likely that they will be willing to spend in future years.

But again, should we care? When I buy tickets to Disney World I don’t really care how much money it costs to keep Its a Small World running. When I decide to buy a ticket to a movie, I will sometimes pay attention to how much the movie is grossing, but only as a gauge of how popular it is. These are terrible analogies and I’m not sure if there’s anything else in the world quite like professional sports math.

So discuss in the comments. How do you feel about the moves?