Celts are still far away. Playoff team yes.
"Still far away" to me sounds subjective or ambiguous. But yes, we have at a minimum gone from a borderline eighth seed to last year's development as a sure bet to make playoffs from now to quite possibly the next ten+ years.
Far away could boil down to time rather than the need for Danny to do something big with the asset chip pile.
If you think about Tiers, I think it is likely that we will add an upgrade big through a trade; Monroe or Bogut or someone along that line. If we do that, I think we could join that Toronto/Clippers tier (that is the Clippers without Blake Griffin) and whoever else you want to put in that tier below Golden State and Cleveland (Houston?, San Antonio?). I am very happy with that all things considered. Would love them to pull of a KG-type trade and join GSW and CLE but I don't see it happening.
I'll try this for the East.
Tier 1:
Cleveland
Tier 2:
Toronto
Boston
Tier 3:
Milwaukee
Charlotte
Atlanta
Chicago
Indiana
Washington
Tier 4:
Detroit
New York
Orlando
Tier 5:
Philadelphia
Miami
Brooklyn
I guess we could get even more nerdy and add half tiers. So Philly becomes a stretch four. Maybe we are a stretch two and still have some proving to do before we are up there with Toronto.
Some teams like Detroit and New York could be stretch threes. They are at the door of mediocrity.
The wild card for us is team atmosphere and a system which facilitates inside growth. Maybe Doc got an unfair bad reputation for developing players (i.e. coaching), but the new Celtics style makes it much more interesting to monitor individual player development. I doubt Doc would have kept playing Jaylen almost every game. I'm not sure Marcus Smart would have seen the court so much.
The new Celtics are all about pushing ceilings upward. Brandon Bass got better under Stevens. Isaiah has improved.
We have the perfect coach for the rebuild. I think Brad probably costs us some wins with his annual experimentation. Think of his starting Zeller and Lee. But I have come around that it's fine to lose some games in order to accumulate data on the entire roster.
One of the best parts of this rebuild is watching Danny and Brad put together a balanced roster. The only driftwood I see right now is Zeller and Young. They are the only two players I have little to no hope they can help.
Maybe Danny won't be able to move Zeller, but it was clever to add that sort of contract to enable trades. No one minds a contract that is running out. Gerald Wallace was the last albatross contract. We were looking at three straight years of a sunken $10 million in roster space.
Yabusele, Zizac and even Nader seem to have NBA futures. I think Jordan Mickey is a neutral asset. He is an incomplete. But that's okay, because he is not a Fab Melo or possibly James Young simply taking up space.
Basically the asset base is growing.
We are entering the tier in which the rich get richer. So it might be more about being patient than in how Danny can consolidate and transform the roster into a so-called final product.
Without making any moves, we are at a minimum destined to be overflowing with talent 1-15 and perhaps that will be 1-18 counting stashes. We could end up like Belichick's Patriots. Perhaps if we could fast forward ten years, we would see tons of articles making us sound like the Spurs. Other cities will envy our ability to keep on keeping on easily replacing players like Belichick has had a knack for.