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Thursday, February 17, 2005
I was told there would be no math

So there may not be a luxury tax this summer and we are headed for a new collective bargaining agreement. As it stands, the Celtics are one of the many teams floating above the salary cap and below the tax threshold anyway. I was long going under the assumption that the C's would not care about getting below the salary cap and focus instead on staying in that grey area. Now we hear that owners are nervous about the bargaining agreement and the C's owners in particular might be interested in cutting costs (no sense paying through the nose for a .500 team).

If I get bored one day I'll do some research into what both sides are going to work on in this summer's negotiations (I wonder if they'll loosen the restrictions on player trades and add a minor league system), but for now I'll just accept that owners and GMs are skittish about the whole thing.

So is that going to make this the most boring trade deadline in recent memory? The case has been made for why Danny will and won't make a trade this week. Personally I could roll either way. I see that we have assets to make a deal to aquire a nice piece to our puzzle. On the other hand we can keep those assets, let the ending contracts expire, and take the flexibility into the summer.

I suspect that if a deal that is too good to pass up comes along, Danny will jump at the chance to add an excellent player or first round pick. If another deal is going on and they need some help, I trust that Danny will do what he can to shoehorn himself into it. Otherwise, we'll probably just let it ride and see what we can do with this squad. Either way, I'm thinking it could be an interesting summer.

# posted by Jeff @ 2/17/2005 10:19:00 PM

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