Where Boston’s Value Came From
The Celtics finished 4th in the league in total roster surplus with their best player out for most of the year. The credit goes to the rest of the roster.
Here is the Celtics’ 2025-26 season in two sentences. Their two max-contract stars, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, combined for −$36M of surplus. That is a minus sign, and you are reading it correctly. The team as a whole finished 4th in the league in total surplus, at $327M.
That shouldn’t be possible. It’s a little like a restaurant getting its best review in the year the chef was out.1
The four guys
Derrick White, Payton Pritchard, Neemias Queta and Sam Hauser. Combined salary: $48M. Combined surplus: +$256M, or 78% of Boston’s total. All four rank in the league’s top ten bargains among negotiated contracts, which is a sentence no other team can say about even two of its players.2
Derrick White is the headliner: 10.3 wins above replacement on $28M, which is 18% of the cap. Those are star wins at a starter’s price. But the line that should be framed in the Celtics’ front office is Neemias Queta’s: $2.4M in salary, 5.7 wins, production the market prices at $59M. If you have ever wondered what a market inefficiency looks like in the wild, it looks like a backup center playing 25.1 minutes a night for about the price of a nice house in a Boston suburb.3
And the stars?
Jaylen Brown played 71 games and rated +0.03 per 100: about league average, on a contract priced for a star. That’s the whole of his −$8.8M. Nobody needs a model to know the Celtics’ summer will be a referendum on their two wings, and the model has no special insight into how that referendum should go.
Its contribution is narrower, and possibly more useful. Whatever Boston does with the players it pays the most, the ones it truly can’t afford to lose are the ones it pays the least. Those four produced 78% of the team’s surplus. Surplus is what pays for everything else.
Figures: the 2025-26 season on the retrospective players board, as of this build. Wins are on this model’s own scale and dollars at the open-market price of a win; the method explains both.
- Tatum played 16 games, returning from the Achilles he tore in the 2025 playoffs. His surplus is negative because the model charges his full salary against the games he played, not because of how he played them: he rated +3.08 per 100 when he was out there. ↩
- Checked, not boasted: the build that produced this page counts it. ↩
- Not a nice house in Boston. Let’s not get carried away. ↩
