The Boston Celtics are a team on the rise right now. Although they may not have any superstar players, they do have a superstar head coach in Brad Stevens. Stevens brought a Celtics team with no expectations last season to the playoffs. Even though it was a weak Eastern Conference, it was an impressive feat for the Celtics to have made the playoffs with an extremely young team. The Celtics have a lot of young talent that can continue to get better, but at some point they are going to have to add some top talent if they want to take another step forward, as Stevens can only get so much out of limited talent.
To that end, the Celtics have reportedly been in talks with the Denver Nuggets about potentially trading for Danilo Gallinari, according to the Boston Herald. At this point the discussions have not gotten very far, and most of the talks were before the draft, but it is being reported that talks will likely be revived at some point.
The reason Gallinari is such a popular target for the Celtics is because he has an expiring contract this season for about $11.5 million and the Nuggets are clearly in rebuild mode. Gallinari is only 26 years old and there are conflicting reports as to whether the Nuggets will be willing to trade him, but most reports say that they are willing to trade him for the right price.
The Celtics are one of the few teams that might be able to afford that right price because of all of their assets, whether it's all of their first round picks in upcoming drafts or their young talent. The Celtics recently traded for David Lee which was a great pickup for them, and they only had to give up an aging Gerald Wallace.
If the Celtics were somehow able to craft a trade for Gallinari it would give them two bona fide scorers on the roster that weren't there last season. They were the seventh seed in the East without Lee and Gallinari; with them both they could really make some noise. The 6-10 small forward has a career average of 14.2 points per game while shooting 42 percent from the field and 37 percent from three. Gallinari had his best season in 2012-13 but tore his ACL at the end of the season and missed the entire season the next year. Last season was his first full season back, and by the end of the year he looked to be fully healthy and back to old form, so the Celtics should have no hesitation if they get the chance to pull the trigger on a trade.
