no team with smart management would go deep into the luxury tax unless they were serious contenders.
I'm not sure that I agree. The Warriors, for instance, are extraordinarily deep into the tax, and they weren't contenders last year. It didn't stop them from adding Kelly Oubre.
I think that fans let the owners whining about profits affect their judgment with this stuff. The Celtics are making $90 million in profit per year. The owners are sitting on a $2 billion increase in franchise value. And yet, ownership has spent a total of $51 million in tax over 18 years. The Warriors drop that in one season, plus more. Don't let Wyc cry poverty and use that as an excuse to put an inferior product on the floor.
you're raising a different point and I think we have a different definition of 'deep'. You also seem to have a real grudge about how much Wyc is making as an owner of the C's.
I would expect decent teams to be paying tax as part of putting together a good team. Paying repeater tax is something I think those same teams look to duck every few years in order to avoid paying excessive amounts of tax for a team that cannot contend. However, if a team has an opportunity to improve into contention, paying the tax should not be a hesitancy. The questions are how far over, how long would the team remain in the tax and how big is the window of contention in order to determine how 'deep' does that team go into the tax penalty.
I would not expect non-contenders to be under the tax. I would also think that this would not be a permanent status since all teams should be trying to become contenders rather than perpetual bottom dwellers.
It's not a grudge, it's pointing out facts. The fact is that the Celtics are one of the most profitable teams in the NBA, and have been for quite some time. They make a team like the Heat look like a Triple A franchise when it comes to profitability. And yet, there seems to be a question about whether that money should be used to improve the team.
Wyc has the mentality of a venture capitalist. I'd prefer the team was sold to somebody who placed titles over maximizing profits.
I think that’s a little unfair (although maybe not totally unfair). The Celtics were a top spending team, typically one of the top 3-4 payrolls, during the Big 3 era. I’m sure we could look back at that era at a player who got away and wonder if a few more dollars out of the owners’ pockets would’ve helped (Tony Allen being the most obvious, although he also wanted to start so it wasn’t purely a dollars issue), but for the most part we can’t say that cheapness was our problem then.
Then they broke apart the team when it was needed, so they weren’t going to be a luxury tax team at that time. After the rebuild seemed to be going faster than expected, one could maybe argue they could have spent more in the 2015-2016 season, but they were trying to create double max room for KD and Horford, which almost worked, so it’s hard to say that there were dollars that should have been otherwise spent. In 2017 they again played the max salary market, which again limited salaries, as its very hard to use cap room and get to the luxury tax in the same year, but did bring another max player.
In the summer of 2018, they let the taxpayer MLE go unused. Perhaps there was someone they could have signed, but depth wasn’t really the problem with that team. Still, one can concoct a not completely unbelievable story that there was some vet they could have paid $5 million who would have made Kyrie happy, rather than wasting a roster spot on Yabusele, and this would have made all the difference. Kyrie’s a total flake, so I doubt it, but Kyrie’s a total flake, so maybe so.
Anyway, the team was all set to spend really big in 2019, with a max for Kyrie, a new deal for Horford, maybe even keeping Rozier and Morris, when everything fell apart. This led them back towards hunting for cap room, and thus limiting spending.
This past offseason they lost Hayward. Was it due to cheap ownership? Perhaps. But it a) seemed like there was more than dollars to the story, and b) as Hayward missed 40% of the season with yet another foot/ankle injury, it’s not difficult to understand why the team wasn’t willing to give him $30 million a year. They hard-capped themselves with the Thompson signing, and by the time the trade deadline came around, the team had provided little reason to pay the tax. (Although even after the deadline, had the Fournier stayed healthy Celtics advanced far in the playoffs, they would have been subject to the tax, so it wasn’t completely avoided).
This offseason, who knows. They could offer Fournier a lot of money and go far into the tax if they want. I’m not convinced he’s the right player for this team, but they could. But the larger point is there weren’t many opportunities in the post Big-3 era to be crazy high spenders. The way that you get into that level of the tax is by giving large contracts to your players with Bird rights, and the Celtics have lost a lot of those players to free agency recently for reasons that weren’t purely salary-related.
My dream offseason is that we push in the chips to convert Kemba to Beal, extend Smart, and re-sign Fournier. But that requires the Wizards to play along, and I think they keep him and try to convince him not to walk away. So my realistic season is we get ready for Beal’s free agency in 2022, and probably lose out on free agents who want more than a 1-year-deal.
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Topic: Do you think the Celtics will spend deep into the luxury tax? (Read 8183 times)