Stingy Celtics repeat mistakes

["Stephen Beauregard" <sb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stingy Celtics repeat mistakes


By Peter May, Globe Staff, 7/16/2003

oday marks the official start of free agency. Players can sign. Coaches and
general managers can talk about their new guys. The floodgates have opened --
but not here.



''There are no floodgates for us,'' Celtics basketball boss Danny Ainge said
yesterday after catching some action at the Reebok Summer League at
UMass-Boston. ''We're going to have to wait to see who's still in the water at
the end.''

Did I miss something? Has Paul Gaston repurchased the Celtics and no one told
me about it? Ainge's remarks bring to mind the classic Bob Hope line when he
hosted the Oscars in 1968: ''Welcome to the Academy Awards, or, as it's known
in my house, Passover.''

Here we are, a year removed from the Silly Summer of 2002, when Chris Wallace
had his hands tied by ownership and couldn't re-sign Rodney Rogers. Here we
are, a year later, with new owners, a new basketball operations chief, and,
still, we are hearing the same, sad song: We won't spend the money.

And this lament comes after April's Atlas-boosted ticket price increases. For
what? A rookie point guard joining the same team from last year? While the
Nets have added Alonzo Mourning and the Magic have added Juwan Howard?

''We don't have the middle-class exception to spend, so we're going to have to
wait,'' Ainge said yesterday. He's wrong. They do have the middle-class
exception, which works out to nearly $5 million. Even with the NBA salary cap
increasing to about $44 million -- a jump of about 9 percent -- ownership has
decided that money, which could be used to sign a decent free agent or two,
will likely go unspent because the Celtics don't want to be paying more of a
luxury tax than they would otherwise pay.

Great. This is just what we heard last year and Gaston took a well-deserved
grilling for it. Why should it be any different this year? For all their
acknowledged enthusiasm and pep, the new ownership group is doing exactly the
same thing as the old one -- tying management's hands in free agency and
giving Jimmy O'Brien another bare-bones outfit. (We're already preparing for a
13-man roster as well; it could even be 12 again.)

It's not as if the Celtics have taken the phones off the hook. Ainge said
yesterday he has contacted 20 free agents, but most of them have told him the
same thing: We want more than what you are willing to offer, which is the
veteran's minimum. The veteran's minimum is an attractive ''alternative'' to
teams because, in cases of the longer-tenured veterans, the league picks up a
piece of the tab and the full salary does not go on the books. And it's only a
one-year deal.

Yesterday, Erick Strickland's agent was at the summer league and he noted that
he had talked to Boston about getting his client back to the Celtics. Paul
Pierce had expressed such a desire the night before. But the Bucks stepped up
to the plate with a two-year deal worth a shade more than $3 million.

That's the sort of love that Walter McCarty wants the Celtics to show him,
rather than have to settle for what he did last year -- a one-year deal at the
veteran minimum. McCarty is the living definition of a veteran-minimum player
in these economic times, and he is forgetting that he was dramatically
overpaid prior to last year. But, based on last year, he probably deserves
more than the minimum, which for him would be around $876,000. But who is
going to give it to him?

''If there were no luxury tax issues, this deal would have been done in five
minutes,'' McCarty's agent, Michael Higgins, said yesterday. He said he'd have
a better read on McCarty's future in the next few days, once players start
signing or re-signing. But the Celtics have not come off their veteran minimum
offer and, asked if McCarty would accept such an offer from Boston, Higgins
hesitated and said, ''I don't think so.''

The Celtics' other free agent, Mark Blount, is likely to end up making the
minimum, although you'd think some size-challenged team would give him a try.
Mark Bartlestein, who represents Blount, said, ''We know it's a tough decision
for the Celtics because they're a little cash strapped and because of the
luxury tax. But Mark really wants to get a deal done there because he likes
his role and he likes playing for Jimmy.''

The Celtics are not cash strapped. The owners forked over $360 million for the
team -- and insist they did not overpay. They simply choose not to spend when
they could spend. Their explanation is that every dollar they spent is, in
reality, a $4 expense because of what they might lose down the road.

They're not alone by any stretch of the imagination. A lot of teams are
holding the line. But it's hard to cry ''austerity'' when you've blown ticket
prices through the roof. The fans put up with this last year and returned, as
they invariably seem to do. They got an inferior product that, predictably,
did not measure up to the team from the previous year.

The loss of a McCarty or Blount won't hurt the Celtics as much as the loss of
Rogers. They will still be a credible team in the Eastern Conference. But the
idea of taking a pass on free agency when a couple of players might tip the
balance is tough to swallow.

This was how Gaston left it and this is how the new guys have chosen to do it.
The more things change .

Thanks,

Steve
sb@xxxxxxxxxxxx

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