The Celtics will release former first-round pick Guerschon Yabusele, reports Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports (via Twitter).
Yabusele has a $3,117,240 cap hit for the 2019-20 season, per Basketball Insiders, so a team with enough cap room or a trade exception big enough to absorb that number could claim him. Otherwise, he’ll become an unrestricted free agent and the Celtics will be on the hook for that dead money. Boston wouldn’t owe him his $4,781,846 salary for 2020-21, since that’s a team option that has not yet been exercised.
Yabusele, the 16th overall pick in the 2016 draft, remained overseas for a year before joining the Celtics in 2017. The 6-foot-8 power forward didn’t make much of an impact for the club in his two seasons in Boston, averaging 2.3 PPG and 1.4 RPG in just 6.6 minutes per contest (74 games).
As Keith Smith of RealGM notes (via Twitter), waiving Yabusele will create some extra roster flexibility for the Celtics, who had been projected to have 15 players on guaranteed contracts. The club now has an open regular-season roster spot available for a 15th man.
More must-reads: