How should Celtics fans feel as traded player exception vanishes?

Forsberg: What’s next for the Celtics as $17.1M trade chip vanishes? originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston

The Evan Fournier $17.1 million traded player exception vaporized on Monday night, the Celtics unable to find a worthy use for it before the final buzzer.

This would be a pricklier subject if the Celtics hadn’t found an alternate means to add a $22.6 million player this offseason in Malcolm Brogdon. Already staring at a hefty tax bill while sitting roughly $20 million over the tax line with an incomplete roster, it felt unlikely the team would use even a modest chunk of the TPE before the clock struck midnight.

There will be some who quibble with wasting any asset that could fortify a championship-caliber roster. They will point to the insane spending by teams like the Warriors and Clippers to suggest that Boston can’t be frugal in an arms race.

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But the reality is that the Celtics’ roster was already at least 10 deep. The likelihood of finding a player on reasonable money who could crack the team’s rotation (and without stripping further assets) was never high in the aftermath of the Brogdon deal.

So how do the Celtics fill out the roster from here?

Still TPEs available

The Celtics still have a series of smaller traded player exceptions that might allow them to fortify their roster, whether that’s this summer or, more likely, before the trade deadline. That TPE list is now headlined by the $6.9 million Juancho Hernangomez TPE and a $5.9 million Dennis Schroder TPE.

Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens stressed last week before the Fournier TPE expired that Boston had the green light to spend but it had to be the “right trade to be made.”

With only depth pieces needed to finish a roster that currently houses 12 players and a pair of two-way contracts, the Celtics still have that…