What's the worst Celtics trade or Free Agent signing ever & why?

[hardlyyardley]

Redz

at least when we gave up 3 #1s for mc adoodoo, we then traded him to detroit for 2 #1s and ml carr...traded one of those to gstate in parish/mchale deal

got to go with potapenko for a #1...cost us a shot at andre miller and the joe johnson trade for rogers/delk

at least with travis knight signing,  we traded him for tony battie

[Redz]

Redz

at least when we gave up 3 #1s for mc adoodoo, we then traded him to detroit for 2 #1s and ml carr...traded one of those to gstate in parish/mchale deal

got to go with potapenko for a #1...cost us a shot at andre miller and the joe johnson trade for rogers/delk

at least with travis knight signing,  we traded him for tony battie

Yeh but Potapenko helped bring us Vinny B and Shammond Williams!

[elrod enchilada]

The McAdoo trade was horrible but at least Red parlayed McAdoo into ML Carr and the no. 1 pick that translated into Parish and McHale.

The Silas for Rowe trade was terrible too, but that was done because the owner was too cheap to sign Silas.

But the worst trade, hands down in my opinion, was one that is rarely mentioned: Paul Westphal for Charlie Scott. Scott played one serviceable season for the Cs and Westphal went on to be first or second team all-NBA for the next five seasons. Those of us who saw him play in the late 70s saw a very special player.For a few years he was simply the most efficient and devasting offensive player in the league. Had he played for the Cs during those years he would be remembered as the greatest 2 guard in Cs history.

[EJPLAYA]

As for recently it has to be Scal he is like the fourth highest paid on the team and pretty much untradeable with his salary

You're just an anti-Scal guy. There is no way on earth that an objective look at some of these other guys that Scal's signing rates anywhere near the others. Throwing out him being the 4th highest player on the team when he only makes 3 mil per season is very misleading. With three guys making 60 mil together you aren't going to have any mid level salaries. Sure he isn't what we hoped for, but this Scal hate is just a snowball thing and his negative legend is getting so overblown it is stupid.

[17iscoming]

I posted this yesterday and no one seemed to notice but it seems relevant here.

Here is a link to all C's transactions:

http://www.prosportstransactions.com/basketball/Search/Search.php

Maybe this helps refresh a few memories.

My answer is probaly VitalyP

[the_Bird]

I gotta go with the Vin Baker deal because everybody - EVERYBODY - knew it was a terrible deal at the time, even if we didn't know the cause of Baker's decline.  Gotta figure that with the amount he was drinking, they could have found of that Baker had a problem with just a little bit of asking around.  Isn't Chris Wallace supposed to know everyone?  What's the point of being a people who know people if you can't ask those people whether Baker was showing up to practice with alcohol on his breath?

I can't fault the Delk/Rogers-for-Johnson trade TOO much, since they were making a concerted effort to make some noise in the playoffs and that DID work.  It's like Bagwell-for-Larry Anderson; a trade that REALLY sucks in retrospect, but not one that people complained about when Anderson was shutting everyone down.  If anything, the Joe Johnson trade was bad because they had to know they weren't going to be able to re-sign Rodney, and even if we HAD gotten by New Jersey there we didn't have a prayer of doing anything in the finals.  So, you can fault it for being a trade that wasn't enough to make us a championship team, but also one that was likely to hurt us in the long term (but it still wasn't as bad as the Vinnie deal).

Plus, Johnson really looked BAD at the time of that trade.  He looked tenative and lost; given how the guys were playing at the time, it wasn't unreasonable to think that Kedrick really had the edge. 

[TripleOT]

The McAdoo trade was horrible but at least Red parlayed McAdoo into ML Carr and the no. 1 pick that translated into Parish and McHale.

The Silas for Rowe trade was terrible too, but that was done because the owner was too cheap to sign Silas.

But the worst trade, hands down in my opinion, was one that is rarely mentioned: Paul Westphal for Charlie Scott. Scott played one serviceable season for the Cs and Westphal went on to be first or second team all-NBA for the next five seasons. Those of us who saw him play in the late 70s saw a very special player.For a few years he was simply the most efficient and devasting offensive player in the league. Had he played for the Cs during those years he would be remembered as the greatest 2 guard in Cs history.

IIRC, Charlie Scott's one "serviceable" season was a championship one in 1976.  Scott was the team's third leading scorer, after Cowens and JoJo White, and he and White formed a tremendous backcourt. 

He was having another solid year in 1977 when Red traded him in season for Don Chaney, the disgraced Kermit Washington, and a number one pick, who ended up to be Freeman Williams, a pick the Cs traded along with Kermit, Sid Wicks, and ironically, the guy that Kermit fought with, Kevin Kunnert, for Tiny Archibald, the pick that became Danny Ainge, and others.   

So Red spun Scott off into what eventually became Tiny and Danny Ainge.    I would have loved to have seen Whesphal as a Celtics when he was tearing up the league, but I certainly enjoyed the three championships the Cs got  while he was putting numbers up elsewhere, and the one championship two years after he retired.

On the face of it, the Wesphal for Scott trade wasn't great, but Red made the most of it, as usual. Scott was at least as good a player as Wesphal, careerwise, and at the time of the trade, Scott was a proven commodity, while Paul was trying to establish himself in the league.  Red made that trade to win a championship, and it worked.  Scott was as big a scorer as Westphal in Phoenix as Paul became, but in Boston, Scott blended in perfectly that one championship season, playing solid defense and contributing with team oriented offense, something that Red might had felt that Westphal couldn't had done there at that time. 

This trade was the classic example of trading an unproven guy on the way up for a very good one on the way down. If Jeff Green ends up putting in five or six all star seasons, while Ray Allen fades a bit and is traded for a couple of assets that help the Cs put up banners 18 and 19, will that be a bad trade too?   

I'd say the Vin Baker trade was pretty horrific, and if he didn't drink his way out of $30m+ of his horrific contract, it would have been even worse.     

[guava_wrench]

As for recently it has to be Scal he is like the fourth highest paid on the team and pretty much untradeable with his salary

Perk makes more than Scal.

Scal also makes less than 1 million more than House, TE, and Rondo. Rondo, of course, is still on his rookie deal.

Still, not a good signing.

[Evantime34]

How is it not the Blount signing. He gave us a year of about 15/10 and then made 8-10 million a year for what 4 years.

The Joe Johnson trade looks bad now but if we had signed Rogers after that year I think it's a good trade.

[Fan from VT]

In the Denver trade in 1999, we got to choose which year we wanted denver's first round pick from 01-04. We used it the first year possible: 2001, #11, Kedrick Brown. Had we waited, it would have been #5 in 02 (Caron Butler, Amare Stoudemire). waited one more year? we would have had #3 in 2003. oh, just 'melo, wade, bosh.

[BballTim]

so in a "perfect world" for a monday morning quarterback.

we're looking at Joe Johnson and Carlos Boozer for Tony Delk and Rodney Rogers

  Worse, it was a short term rental on Rogers, who we made no effort tp re-sign.

[Reyquila]

Why isnt Gugliotta among our best worst trades or FA signings?

[jaketwice]

I thought letting wall-eyed college coach/massachusetts state poltician/gangster Rick "the pinky ring" Pitino run the club turned out pretty bad.

But then someone mentioned stone hands Blount. That guy's lack of enthusiasm was terrible. Eric Montross was also a huge embarassment - he appeard on more posters than Michael Jordan: getting dunked on.

The Dana Barros "streak." As if hitting a 3 pointer in some number of games matters at all!

Losing Bruce Bowen was pretty stupid in hindsight.

ML Carr was the most insufferable though. Even when I was 8, or whatever, I cringed about that doofus. He kept smiling even though the team was losing. That smile probably did more to injure my boyhood enjoyment of professional sports than any other factor.  And then we DIDN'T get Duncan.

[Mean Gerald Green]

Brian Scalabrine or the Joe Johnson trade.

With AI3 they might as well have just thrown 15 million dollar in a trash barrel and set it aflame. He's unplayable and a tremendous waste of team resources.

No need to explain the Joe Johnson trade...everyone knows...

[CelticsWhat35]

In the Denver trade in 1999, we got to choose which year we wanted denver's first round pick from 01-04. We used it the first year possible: 2001, #11, Kedrick Brown. Had we waited, it would have been #5 in 02 (Caron Butler, Amare Stoudemire). waited one more year? we would have had #3 in 2003. oh, just 'melo, wade, bosh.

The intitial decision to take the pick when they did wasn't that bad at the time, it was more who they took that was a bad decision.  Of course, looking back they should've definitely held onto the pick, but the Nuggets went from 14 wins (lockout year) to 35 in 2000 and 40 in 2001.  With Antonio McDyess as one of the best young stars in the game having not even reached his prime yet, along with Nick Vane Exel in his prime and a solid nucleus of other players, it was reasonable to think that the pick would not get much better in the future.

But what ended up happening was McDyess got injured the following season and only played 10 games, and they then blew up the team and traded away Van Exel and LaFrentz.