With DeMarcus Cousins traded to New Orleans, Chicago Bulls wing Jimmy Butler is the biggest name remaining with a realistic chance of changing teams before Thursday's trade deadline.
According to ESPN's Brian Windhorst, the Bulls are seeking a package of a pick expected to be in the top five selections, a current starter and a top prospect in return for Butler. The Boston Celtics, currently second in the Eastern Conference, are the team best positioned to make such an offer because they hold the Brooklyn Nets' picks in the next two drafts.
Brooklyn is all but certain to enter this year's lottery with the best odds at giving Boston the No. 1 overall pick. Should the Celtics include that pick in a Butler offer?
Valuing the 2017 Nets pick
Last May, I broke down the value of the top pick in the 2016 draft in the context of the Lakers potentially considering a trade before they landed the No. 2 pick via the lottery.
While much of that analysis holds, something important has changed: the NBA's rookie scale for first-round picks. The league's new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with its players, which kicks in before 2017 draft picks can sign, gradually ramps up the salaries for first-round picks so that they eventually represent a similar percentage of the salary cap as before the cap unexpectedly jumped because of the NBA's new national TV deals.
As a result, the value a typical No. 1 pick will provide above and beyond his salary during his rookie contract has dropped from $40.5 million in 2016 to $35.8 million in 2017.
Of course, while Boston has the best chance at the No. 1 pick (25 percent), that's not the same as being likely to get the No. 1 pick. In fact, the most likely outcome for a team that enters the lottery in the top spot is finishing with the No. 4 pick. Multiplying out the value of each pick by the Celtics' chances of getting it estimates the value of Brooklyn's first-round pick at about $26.9 million above and beyond the salary the player will earn over his rookie contract.
Valuing Butler's production and Celtics veterans
As compared to a rookie contract for a top pick, Butler's current deal -- signed in the summer of 2015 before maximum salaries increased -- is even more favorable to his team. Over the next three seasons, multiyear projections based on ESPN's real plus-minus and my SCHOENE projection system estimate Butler being worth between 10 and 14 wins as compared to a replacement-level player. (Butler's plus-6.8 RPM ranks second in the league this season.)
Based on the cost of buying a win on the open market via free agency, that would make Butler's production worth around $40 million per season -- far more than the $18.7 million he's scheduled to make in 2017-18 and $19.8 million in 2018-19 before a player option for 2019-20 could return him to free agency.
Including the remainder of this season, I estimate Butler's value above and beyond his salary at $57.4 million, making him one of the NBA's most valuable players in trade -- and far more valuable than the Nets' pick alone.
Still, there are a couple of reasons for Boston not to rush to make the move. The most obvious is that Chicago would surely want more than just Brooklyn's pick in a deal. Along the lines of what Windhorst outlined, a possible trade package would include 2016 No. 3 overall pick Jaylen Brown as well as one of the Celtics' current perimeter players, presumably Avery Bradley, Jae Crowder or Marcus Smart.
Including Crowder should be a non-starter. Though not as valuable on the court as Butler, Crowder -- whose plus-3.7 RPM ranks 21st -- has an even better contract. He'll make $22 million combined over the next three seasons while giving Boston quality starter production. So I estimate his net value above and beyond his salary at $72 million -- more even than Butler's.
Because he has just one season remaining on his contract, and because he doesn't rate as well by RPM or box-score stats as Crowder, Bradley is a much better option from Boston's point of view. I estimate his net value at just $3.7 million, though the Celtics surely place more value on him as a starter. Smart falls somewhere in between, with an estimated net value of $17.5 million for the remainder of his cheap rookie contract.
That leaves Brown, the trickiest part of a potential Butler deal to evaluate. The Celtics viewed him as the third-best player in last year's draft, and a typical No. 3 pick would provide about $27 million in net value above his remaining rookie salary -- similar to the value of this year's Brooklyn pick. I would include Brown in a Butler offer because his statistical production has yet to match that of the typical No. 3 pick, but Boston might reasonably balk at giving up him, Smart and the Nets' pick.
Can pick protection close the gap?
There is at least one other reason for the Celtics not to give up the Brooklyn pick. So far we've considered only the value such a player would offer on his rookie contract. But a key part of the reason top picks are so valuable is because of the chance to extend or re-sign them to relatively favorable maximum contracts if they pan out as superstars.
There's a way Boston could retain some of that value in a Butler trade. If the Celtics are enamored of Washington guard Markelle Fultz -- the top player on Chad Ford's big board for the 2017 draft -- they could protect the Nets' pick to keep it only if it lands No. 1 overall.
As ESPN's Zach Lowe noted Monday, according to multiple sources the league quietly changed its rules last June to allow protection on picks that originally belonged to another team -- as long as the new team owns the pick outright.
So, for example, Boston could put whatever protection it wants on the 2018 Brooklyn pick because the Celtics already own the pick. Since this year's Nets pick is actually the right to swap, Boston would have to exercise the swap now instead of waiting until after the lottery to do so -- something that's realistic given the Celtics are already assured a better record than Brooklyn.
It is technically still possible for Boston to miss the playoffs and get a better pick by winning the lottery, a risk the Celtics would surely be willing to take. (It's also technically possible that Boston could offer me a 10-day contract, and those have similar odds of happening.)
So how much would protecting the pick change its value? That depends on a few factors. The first is how you model the value of a pick this year versus one the following season, since teams put a premium on getting help now. In this case, there's also the continued increases to the rookie scale, so 2018 first-round picks will make more relative to the cap than 2017 first-rounders.
There's also the matter of valuing individual prospects as compared to the typical value of a pick. If Fultz is rated a once-in-a-generation talent, protecting the pick makes a bigger difference. Fultz's statistical projections by my model are a bit below average for a No. 1 pick (UCLA's Lonzo Ball has projections more typical of a top selection) and observers who are familiar with both players are split on whether he's a better prospect than the top recruit in the 2017 freshman class according to ESPN Recruiting Nation, Washington-bound forward Michael Porter Jr.
Lastly, there's the issue of modeling where the Nets' pick will fall in the 2018 draft. While Brooklyn is unlikely to improve dramatically next season without its lottery pick, a healthy Jeremy Lin could make the Nets more competitive. They went 3-6 in Lin's nine starts before a hamstring injury shut him down after Christmas. Without Lin in the lineup, Brooklyn is 6-38. The Nets might also continue to be aggressive in the free-agent market.
RPM's projections for Brooklyn entering this season are probably a decent proxy for 2017-18 as well. They gave the Nets an 11.6 percent shot of finishing with the top pick. Without an adjustment for delaying the pick a year, I'd project the Nets' 2018 pick as worth about $21.5 million on average in net value.
If we replace the value of the 2017 No. 1 pick ($35.8 million) with that estimate, we find top-pick protection reduces the value of Brooklyn's 2017 pick by about $3.5 million -- perhaps enough for both sides to find a package of Bradley, Brown and the pick reasonable.
There are other factors for Boston to consider, like whether adding Butler would be enough to allow them to contend with the Cleveland Cavaliers this season, how he'd fit with a ball-dominant point guard (Isaiah Thomas) and what other superstars (like Paul George of the Indiana Pacers) might ultimately come on the trade market. But if the Celtics think Butler is the right fit, they should feel comfortable offering this year's Nets pick -- with the right protection.