Luka Garza agrees to fully-guaranteed contract with Boston Celtics

Free agent center Luka Garza has agreed to a two-year, $5.5 million contract with the Boston Celtics, according to ESPN’s Shams Charania. The deal is fully-guaranteed and was negotiated by representatives Mark Bartelstein and Kirean Piller of Priority Sports.

Garza spent the past three seasons with the Minnesota Timberwolves. He was drafted by the Detroit Pistons in the second round of the 2021 NBA Draft.

A role player for the Wolves during his tenure there, he averaged 3.5 points and 1.4 rebounds per game in his limited role. He averaged 6.4 minutes per game these last three seasons and did not start in any of his 102 regular season appearances for Minnesota.

Before joining the NBA, Garza was a superstar in the Iowa Hawkeyes men’s basketball program. In both his junior and senior seasons, Garza was regarded as one of the top players in the country and earned Big Ten Player of the Year and consensus first-team All-American honors in those seasons. He won the national player of the year award during his senior season in 2020-21.

That season he averaged 24.1 points and 8.7 rebounds while leading Iowa to a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament. Their season was ended with an early upset in the second round at the hands of Chris Duarte and the Oregon Ducks.

Now, Garza will join a new championship-caliber team in the Boston Celtics. This time last offseason, the Celtics were enjoying their first NBA championship since 2008. Garza will hope to slide into the lineup as a role player next season in the hopes of winning two in just three years.

The Celtics are widely considered one of the, if not the singularly, most successful franchises in NBA history. Their 18 NBA Championships are the most of any in all of the league’s history. The first of those was in 1957, and the most recent was in 2024.

Along the way, 41 members of the Basketball Hall of Fame have played for Boston. That includes legends like Bill Russell, Larry Bird, and Robert Parish.

This past season, the Celtics finished with a 61-21 overall record, good for second-best in the Eastern Conference. Despite coming off a championship victory the year before, Boston was bounced in six games against the New York Knicks in the Eastern Conference semifinals. They’ll look to return to championship form next season.