My response to people who want to trade IT, as always, is what do you feel the opportunity cost is for retaining him?
Or in other words, what is to be gained by letting him go?
Simply your feeling that he may not be worth $40 million when he is age 34-35 does not mean the team has a better option.
The most obvious opportunity cost is not getting better-fitting trade assets for him now - he will either walk for nothing in 2018 or become a likely difficult to trade max contract.
The next most obvious: playing/development time for Fultz, likely a better player in the near future.
I think they can play together. I don't see a problem with not handing the keys to the team over to Fultz right away. Players like that tend to need some development time.
As for better-fitting trade assets, the question is what you think you can really get for a player like IT on the last year of his deal.
It's really hard to get fair value for stars in general, but especially hard to get fair value for a guy with an obvious glaring flaw (i.e. size / defense) on the last year of his deal.
I'm also just not sure how you can be confident it would make the Celts better.
Isn't our problem that we don't have enough star talent? How is trading IT for a couple role players and a pick (for example) going to help that?
1) I don't think we can get fair market value for IT, but I would accept a bad trade because the alternative is he walks July , 2018.
2) I accept that IT is the best player on the team, today.
3) I get that the offense runs through IT and he is our only consistent scorer.
4) I believe that we will sign Hayward, who is a legit 20+ scorer so he provides reliable offense.
5) I believe that after two full nba seasons Brown will be ready to be relied on as a consistent scoring threat.
6) I believe that after a full nba season Fultz will be ready to be relied on as a consistent scoring threat.
7) Today we get the bulk of our offense from IT, Bradley and Crowder. I only want to move IT so we would keep Bradley and Crowder, only they would move to the bench giving us a strong bench.
So we replace IT's offense with Hayward, Fultz, and Brown. And keep Bradley and Crowder so we keep their offense.
9) we suffer no drop in offense letting IT walk and we get a defensive boost because we don't have to compensate for IT's horrid D.
10) if we can get a solid rotational player for him I'll take it because I do not believe IT will be a celtic after his contact is up.
11) of course if we can get a fair trade and a good player, preferably a big man (IT to the Kincks for Porzingis) that would be ideal.