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Re: new bulpett nba notes

From: CeltsSteve@xxxxxxx

And the sad
thing is that this team is oh so close. If Gaston would allow Wallace to
spend say another $3.5M right now to sign Travis Best and Gary Trent as a
tough guy (yeah I know - 13 guys on the roster instead of only 12), they
counteract NJ's moves and then some.
Yes. The iron seems hot enough to strike now, that's for sure. When you make it to the conference finals, you need to build on that for the next year. With the acquisition of Baker, perhaps the team has done that. But,
think of the team we might have fielded if Rogers could have been kept, Baker acquired, and the guys you mentioned above could be signed. Joisey be damned; we'd have a great chance to take the East, no question. Even now, Best and Trent sound good. Real good. And it won't happen. Let's not forget that, especially if Jordan returns, the tax may not even be levied.

I was no big Kenny Anderson fan until last year. We saw a Kenny Anderson that accepted a third option role, played defense pretty effectively (especially given his matador tendencies in his early career), plus the guy bounced back from one of the worst seasons I've ever seen. So if they move him you've got to shore up the point guard position. I just would have hoped that, if they had decided to move Kenny for Baker, then they could have had a plan in place for "replacing" Kenny at the point. Something better than "we'll wait to see who doesn't latch on to another team that we can get cheap", I mean. I don't want the cheapest guy for the job. I want the best guy for the job. I'm no MBA, but isn't one of the tenets of good business to invest in your product to make it better? In the NBA the players *are* the "product". Talent wins.


Winning the East and advancing to the Finals is not at all a stretch. They'd
get at least two home games and very possibly three. How much in revenue do
those three games generate? Seems to me even a beancounter like Richard Pond
can figure that one out. Couple that with the savings from Pitino's
resignation, I just don't get it.
Part of the problem as I see it is, if they are going to run this thing as a business, then run it well. This doesn't even seem like good business. It just seems cheap. Cheap because they wait for some point guard to fall to them, some point guard who, by definition, no one else wants. But hey,
he'll come cheap. Cheap because they want to make the conference finals again, but they don't want to pay for it, but hey, they *will* raise ticket prices. Gimme a break. This defines "cheap" to me.


And as has been pointed out previously, he (Gaston) is only delaying the
inevitable anyway. What happens in two years if Kedrick blossoms (or should I
be positive and say "when") and his contract comes up for an extension?
Unless, of course, the team is banking on a new CBA by then.
Very interesting question. Gaston was a major push behind the current CBA,
though, right? If I was a betting man, I'd say that he probably will back a similar luxury tax in the next CBA. He seems to favor the idea that the league can legislate spending by taxing. This is foolish, as there will *always* be those who will pay the tax to overspend.

I noticed that MLB went to a similar luxury tax system. This trend is foolish, imo. If you do not want franchises to spend over a certain amount, institute a hard cap. This weak luxury tax system only allows for the teams who could already absorb the tax to continue doing so, and the teams that do not want to pay the tax have a much harder time acquiring talent.

I say quit with the idea that sports can be run in a free market. Level the playing field. Something like, setting a minimum and maximum salary that are closer together. This gets rid of the Sterlings of the world who only want to field a team, and the Cubans and Allens who overspend, and the nuts like Gaston who think they can compete and not pay up. You give opposing teams the same amount of time outs, fouls, et al, don't you? But we let some teams outspend others. Aside from the difficulty in getting such a system passed (which I agree would be considerable, perhaps not even possible), it would solve many problems, I think.

Bird