The Boston Celtics waived guard Dalano Banton on Thursday, shedding his non-guaranteed $2.8 million salary and dropping the team roughly $1.7 million below the luxury tax line, as reported by The Boston Globe. Boston’s payroll now sits at about $198.7 million, and the roster stands at 14 players — a number the team can legally carry until the playoffs.
The timing tells the story. Boston picked up Banton’s option on June 29, then cut him eleven days later, which is what it looks like when a front office holds a piece purely for flexibility until the rest of the board resolves. With the roster now set enough to project the final bill, the move accomplishes the thing this front office has been chasing all month: getting under the line in time to reset the repeater tax, the escalating penalty that hits teams above the tax in three of four seasons.
Set against eighteen banners, a $2.8 million waiver is a footnote. Set against this July, it is the clearest statement yet of how the franchise is operating. Brad Stevens has said publicly that the Jaylen Brown trade was made in part because two players consuming 70 percent of the cap made long-term contention harder; Paul George‘s $54.1 million arrives on the books regardless. The Banton cut is the small, unglamorous end of the same ledger — every dollar of margin under the line protects the flexibility the bigger move was supposed to buy. Whatever one thinks of the direction, the bookkeeping is disciplined: this is a team managing toward its next great roster, not spending to dress up its current one.
For Banton, the move is a clean release into the market. He becomes an unrestricted free agent if he clears waivers, and reporting around the move noted Boston in part wanted to give him a runway to find a real opportunity elsewhere.
On the fantasy side, Banton is off the radar until he signs somewhere — he only carries deep-league appeal if he lands on a rebuilding roster short on ballhandlers, where his size and transition game have produced useful stretches before. In Boston, his exit nudges a few bench guard minutes toward the remaining depth pieces, but nothing that changes anyone’s draft-day math.
