Nicolas Batum’s NBA retirement closes the book on a 15-year career, but his fingerprints show up in a place he never played: the Celtics’ path through the 2020s.
Batum never wore Boston green, and he was never meant to become part of the Celtics’ story. Still, his contract situation in Charlotte ended up helping set off a chain reaction that changed the way Boston’s roster evolved. The Hornets needed cap space to make room for Gordon Hayward, and to do it they waived and stretched the final year of Batum’s deal, which paid him $27 million over the next three years.
That move mattered. Waiving Batum opened the door for Charlotte to sign Hayward, who then was signed and traded to the Hornets in a deal that gave Boston a trade exception.
The Celtics used that exception on Josh Richardson, and Richardson was later moved for Derrick White. That’s how Batum, without ever taking the floor in Boston, ended up as part of the path that brought White to the Celtics.
The same sequence is tied to another small but important turn: Montrezl Harrell passing on Charlotte’s lucrative offer helped create the conditions for Hayward to leave Boston for the Hornets in 2020. Batum’s stretched contract was another piece of that puzzle. Put together, those moves pushed Hayward out of Boston and eventually helped steer White into the Celtics’ lineup a year and a half later.
Of course, nobody can say for sure how it all would have played out if those decisions had gone differently. Hayward might have stayed.
The Celtics might have found White some other way. But the route they took was shaped by a pair of seemingly minor choices that snowballed into something much bigger.
Boston has benefited from that kind of domino effect before. The team’s stretch-run signings of Malik Fitts, Nik Stauskas, and Juwan Morgan in 2022 didn’t look like much at the time, but they eventually helped lead to Malcolm Brogdon the next summer. And back in 2014, the Celtics brought in Marcus Thornton - a move that might have looked like dead weight in a rebuild - and that eventually led to Isaiah Thomas, then Kyrie Irving.
So while Batum’s retirement is the headline, his place in Celtics history is more of a strange footnote than a spotlight moment. Still, it counts. Sometimes the smallest moves leave the biggest mark.
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It never got across the finish line, and the timing of it matters now in a way it probably did not then. Balls time with the Bulls was later derailed by significant knee injuries, which makes the Celtics restraint look a lot different in hindsight, especially for a front office that has had its share of close calls before. Former executive Danny Ainge nearly took similar swings on Robert Swift and Justise Winslow, reminders that big personnel decisions often look much smarter, or much worse, only after the fact. [Read more 🡒]
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Celtics Found One Real Reason For Optimism After That Playoff Exit
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For a team trying to sort out what still travels when the games get tighter, that matters. Tatums ability to score and make plays going to the rim, paired with Pritchards efficiency in the same area, suggests Boston still has a foundation worth building on despite the early end to its run. The challenge now is turning that individual shot-making into something more complete the next time the Celtics get back into playoff pressure. [Read more 🡒]