During his news conference last week, Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens said he was “very comfortable” with the team’s current roster heading into the 2025-26 season.

Stevens appreciates Anfernee Simons’ offensive game and top-shelf 3-point shooting, and Georges Niang’s track record of contributing on successful teams. He believes Luka Garza and Josh Minott both have “unrealized upside” that they weren’t able to show during their time as deep reserves in Minnesota. And he’s high on first-round draft pick Hugo Gonzalez, though the young Spaniard might not be ready to immediately contribute as a 19-year-old rookie.

Boston’s depleted frontcourt is a major question mark, Stevens acknowledged, following the exits of Kristaps Porzingis, Luke Kornet and likely Al Horford. But he likes the players the Celtics have added to their returning core (which is headlined by Jaylen Brown, Derrick White, Payton Pritchard and Sam Hauser) and suggested they didn’t have any more major moves planned.

But according to multiple reports, the Celtics are considering making a marquee addition to their revamped roster — one who likely wouldn’t help them this season but could give them another star-studded starting five in 2026-27.

That player: point guard Damian Lillard, who is a free agent after being waived-and-stretched by the Bucks earlier this month.

The circumstances of Lillard’s departure from Milwaukee created a rare opportunity for a team to sign a superstar-level player at an affordable price, as the Bucks will pay him the $112.6 million remaining on his previous contract. Whether he’ll remain a superstar-level player when he returns to the court is no guarantee, however. Lillard is one of three All-Stars who suffered torn Achilles tendons during the 2025 NBA playoffs — along with Boston’s Jayson Tatum and Indiana’s Tyrese Haliburton — and, like Tatum, is expected to miss at least a large portion of the 2025-26 season, if not all of it.

Is adding Lillard a worthwhile gamble for the Celtics? Here are the pros and cons of that pairing:

The case for signing Lillard

Well, for starters, he’s been one of the NBA’s best offensive players for more than a decade.

A nine-time All-Star and seven-time All-NBA selection (one first team, four second, two third), Lillard has averaged at least 24 points per game for 10 straight seasons and at least seven assists per game for the last six. He’s a clutch shot master and one of the NBA’s preeminent 3-point threats, and he’d be joining a Celtics team that just set an NBA record for made threes in a season.

Lillard’s points per shot attempt has ranked in the 94th percentile or higher among guards in five of the last seven seasons, per Cleaning the Glass, including in 2022-23 and ’24-25.

It shouldn’t be possible in the modern NBA to field a roster that features Tatum, Brown and Lillard, who were set to earn a combined $169.7 million in salary in 2025-26. But since he’ll still be cashing his checks from the Bucks, signing Lillard would cost a fraction of the $54.1 million he was on the books for in Milwaukee this coming season.

Unlike the Celtics’ starting guards for the last two seasons (Derrick White and Jrue Holiday), Lillard is a high-usage player, so finding a way to operate an offense that properly utilizes him, Tatum and Brown would require some creativity from head coach Joe Mazzulla. But if they can strike that balance, he’d give Boston another elite scorer who could help accelerate their return to championship contention. He’d also add depth to a backcourt that only has White and Pritchard under contract beyond 2026.

The Celtics are not expected to contend this season, so there’d be little harm in signing Lillard and allowing him to spend the year rehabbing alongside Tatum — who, according to one recent report, is making a strong push to bring his former Team USA teammate to Boston. The Boston Globe’s Gary Washburn on Saturday reported Tatum “has been active in recruiting Lillard,” with whom he played at the 2020 Olympics in Japan.

From Lillard’s perspective, joining the Celtics could give him a realistic shot at a title in 2027, depending on how Tatum recovers and how Stevens and Co. piece together the rest of the roster. The 13-year veteran’s deepest playoff run was a trip to the Western Conference finals with Portland in 2019.

The case against signing Lillard

If the biggest argument for Lillard is cost, the strongest rebuttal is health.

Lillard turns 35 this week, and he’s recovering from one of the most serious injuries a basketball player can sustain. There’s a good chance he’ll be 36 by the time he takes the court again.

There is zero precedent for a star player in his mid-30s tearing his Achilles and continuing to perform at the same level post-injury. None. It would be borderline stunning if Lillard returns and delivers an All-Star-caliber season in 2026-27, regardless of which team he joins.

There’s optimism that Tatum will be able to overcome his injury, but that’s because he’s 27 and has mostly stayed healthy throughout his NBA career, not to mention that he was operated on within hours by one of the top Achilles surgeons. Lillard is 7 1/2 years older, and he dealt with a slew of other ailments in recent years, missing 110 regular-season games since the start of the 2021-22 campaign.

On the court, Lillard is a below-average defender, so the Celtics would need to be willing to accept his shortcomings at that end (as they’re currently doing with the offense-focused Simons). Adding Lillard also would mean dedicating two roster spots to players who could be unavailable all season.

Lastly, though Lillard reportedly is more receptive to joining Boston than he was in 2023, when the Celtics were linked to him before trading for Holiday, it’s unclear where his priorities lie this offseason. The Celtics can offer Lillard a minimum contract, or a $5.7 million taxpayer mid-level exception if they make additional moves to dip back below the second apron of the luxury tax, which they exceeded with their recent signings of Garza and Minott.

Boston is likely to make those moves regardless, but time will tell whether its valuation of Lillard aligns with his own.