Re: `Re: The Peril Of Too Many Large Contracts or More Trades On The Way

[j.hironaka@unesco.org]

Alex Wang wrote:

> Way,
>
> Time will tell who is right about the value of Battie and Fortson.
> I personally don't believe that Pitino is going to hand them huge
> contracts just because "big men are always paid more" or because
> Michael Stewart got a relatively large contract (6 years, $24M
> is what I read, which starts near $3M, not $6M). In particular,
> I don't see Battie getting a huge payday.
>
> You are right about 2000-2001 projecting to be a bad budget year
> for the Celtics. But there is relief right around the corner in
> the expiring contracts of Barros and Minor. If Pitino wants to
> justify having one especially bad year to Gaston, he can say,
> "Paul, I want to spend the money I got from Portland and Denver
> (for Anderson and Williams) this year to go over the budget."
> My guess is that they actually work over a longer horizon than
> a single season, so this sort of mental accounting is not necessary.

In the past, I've expressed doubt about Pitino's latest budgetary
excuses because I felt he was offering Mercer a shorter-term salary only
to keep him tradable. The problem with the Ron Mercer offer was not the
size of contract but length of contract (4 years at 7 million per year
plus incentives). The only plausible reason why Pitino would be stingy
on the length of contract is because he didn't have complete faith in
Mercer as a team chemistry asset. Pitino's coaching contract runs out in
approximately the same length of time (4 years), so why should he have
cared if Mercer gets a backloaded 7-year deal instead?

IMO, Paul Gaston has a budget ceiling only for the crappy sub .500
version of the Celtics. I don't believe he's cheap so much as he simply
doesn't want to overpay players on a .500 team. If the Celts play
winning basketball in the near future, it's safe to say they will be
just as profitable as the 80's Celtics teams that played in a much
smaller gym but were always in the top three in team payroll. The game
has grown since then. If you live overseas, NBA basketball dwarfs any
other US pro sport. Most sports-savvy kids don't even know the basic
rules of baseball or American football, much less care who Brett Favre
or Ken Griffey Jr is.

Frankly, the Y2K Celtics would not be unique if they had 3 or 4
contracts eating up most or all of their cap space. We shouldn't compare
the Celts to teams below the cap. In the Pitino era, we've consistently
had the vast majority of players signed to contracts. The only reason
Chicago or Orlando will be in a position to bid for Tim Duncan is
because they have half-a-dozen or more player contracts expiring all at
once. Whether or not they succeed in signing any major free agent, they
will still need to sign or re-sign a large number of players just to
field a team for the next season. Most likely they will end up well over
the artificially low salary cap just like any other team making a
good-faith effort to contend for a championship.

So basically I think this is Paul Gaston's dilemma. I feel he would
rather wait and pay a lot more for Fortson and Battie next summer
(provided the team as a whole starts winning) than sign them now to a
more realistic Martha (er, Michael) Stewart range contract. It's not
that Gaston's a proven cheapskate (that's hardly the case) so much as he
isn't willing to invest top dollar, long-term contracts on a team that
hasn't proven it can win.

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