Re: Battling the Celtics propaganda machine, part 2 million

[Alexander Wang <awang@xxxxxxx>]

At 12:02 PM 7/24/2002, Bob McChesney wrote:
> We lost Rogers because Gaston wasn't willing to pay
> a tax. If we hadn't made the trade, we would have been over the threshold
> though, and Gaston (or Pond) would not have allowed it to happen.
> Alex
>
> Alex,
>
> You are right. But the problem with that defense is that is suggests a team
> needs to torch two no. 1 picks to unload a measly $3 million in salary for
> a single season. Nonsense. We could have given up less to lose such a minor
> hit on our cap. I mean NO OTHER TEAM in the NBA has made such a comparable
> deal -- none, zero, nunca, nada -- and the Cs are not the only team with a
> salary cap/ luxury cap obsessed owner.
Bob -

A comparable deal is when Orlando was trying to get more salary cap room.
To dump Derek Strong's relatively small ($3M) salary, they gave up Magette
and Dooling - two lottery picks. Of course, the payoff here was more clear
in terms of getting free agent talent.

I think the problem was that the Celtics were in an uncommon situation -
they were going to be over the tax threshold even after giving up all of
their free agents, and at the same time they were unwilling to pay the
tax. For most teams near the threshold, they've just been losing key players
to free agency instead. The Miami Heat gutted their team last year due
to the tax. The Celtics were in this situation due to past mismanagement
of the cap by Pitino (and Wallace too?)

Anyway... I think that if the sole reason of the trade was to dump $3M in
salary, it could probably have been done slightly cheaper. But the trade also
had the benefit of getting Rogers for the stretch run. The argument that
we could have kept Strickland instead is flawed too, because then we would
have had that much more additional salary - the tax would have precluded
keeping him anyway.

Alex