Are trades for Jimmy Butler and Jahlil Okafor still in play?

Sources are telling us that the C’s are still holding the line on their offers from prior to the draft. They will make trades if teams come around to their price.

Jimmy Butler and Jahlil Okafor are said to be still available, but getting them now won’t be as easy as on draft night when Chicago and Philadelphia, respectively, both coveted the No. 3 overall pick so they could take Providence’s Kris Dunn.

The feeling here is that the Celtics and their fans will be very happy with Jaylen Brown even early on, but Butler and the subsequent recruitment of Horford would have made the club a favorite to reach the Eastern Conference finals. And you have to ask whether Durant’s decision would have been different if he could have joined a team with those two and Isaiah Thomas.

29 teams missed out on signing Kevin Durant.

Well... maybe not all 29. At least two teams missed out on signing KD, one of them being the Boston Celtics. That doesn't mean that Danny Ainge & Co. aren't still hard to work trying to improve Boston's chances at challenging LeBron and the Cavs in the East and, with any luck, the Warriors aka The Empire, in an NBA Finals not to far, far away.

According to the Boston Herald's Steve Bulpett and several 'sources,' trades for Chicago's Jimmy Butler and Philadelphia's Jahlil Okafor are still floating out there in the mid-NBA free agency ether, but at what cost? What deal would be worth it for Boston post NBA Draft?

Now with newly signed All-Star Al Horford on the roster (as long as no emoji-fueled caper to steal him back to Atlanta takes place over the next 24 hours), would the price Ainge would have to pay for either of the mentioned trade targets screw up the chemistry that helped land the Celtics their biggest free agent signing of the modern NBA era?

There is no doubt that Danny isn't done dealing this off-season-- there are just too many personnel moves left to consider. The problem is that there is also just too many men on the roster. Inevitably change is going to come to Boston in 2016-17. If it winds up being either Butler or Okafor, I would be pretty surprised given what it would take to acquire either talent, but stranger things have happened this week.

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