I wish Celticsblog trade season were more like Moose season...

[The Walker Wiggle]

... only two weeks long. Right now we have discussion on a Garnett for Jefferson do-over, Ray Allen for the 3/5ths of the Charlotte Bobcats' starting line-up, and Rajon Rondo for Blake Griffin. I don't like any of those deals, unless we could pull off all three, and THEN we've got something going:

Al Jefferson/ Blake Griffin/ Leon Powe
Gerald Wallace/ Bill Walker
Emeka Okafor/ DeAndre Jordan
Paul Pierce/ Raja Bell/ J.R. Giddens
Baron Davis/ Eddie House

Which is just to say, that I'm already at a total loss.

[Eja117]

I know this feeling. Sometimes I feel like any second the trade scenarios are going to go into a tangent about whether Bigfoot or aliens are more likely.

[LooseCannon]

I'm unqualified to do this, but here is something I would like to see someone do.  Rather than all these trade ideas, I'd like to see someone knowledgeable go through a series of threads (or blog posts), one for each team in the NBA.  Analyze each free agent in terms of their likely contract size and if they'd be a fit for the Celtics at their likely price as well as which signed players they might be willing to trade and why (salary dump, to fill a need, headcase).

It would at least give me a feeling for which trade ideas are stupid fantasies (likely most of them) and which have some basis in reality.

[greg683x]

I'm unqualified to do this, but here is something I would like to see someone do.  Rather than all these trade ideas, I'd like to see someone knowledgeable go through a series of threads (or blog posts), one for each team in the NBA.  Analyze each free agent in terms of their likely contract size and if they'd be a fit for the Celtics at their likely price as well as which signed players they might be willing to trade and why (salary dump, to fill a need, headcase).

It would at least give me a feeling for which trade ideas are stupid fantasies (likely most of them) and which have some basis in reality.

I think this summer, its going to be hard to predict what kind of contracts certain players are going to be recieving.  You cant base their salaries on what a player with their talent would have made in years past.  I have a feeling its going to be a long time before you see a player like Rashard Lewis get paid the amount of money he got paid by Orlando.  A big man who played like Big Baby this year in the playoffs would probably have hit a HUGE payday this offseason, especially back in the Mark Blount era of big man contracts.

I think this summer youll see players who wouldve gotten near max deals in the past settling for a lot less.  Youll see veterans coming out of their prime settling for MLE contracts when they would have been paid generously in the past, and MLE players settling for minimum deals.

The hard part in really determining what theyll get paid is you cant say for sure what teams are really gonna go after them and the amount of money depends on the financial climate of those teams.

[LooseCannon]

I think this summer, its going to be hard to predict what kind of contracts certain players are going to be recieving.

But at least it's speculation which feels like it's going somewhere.  You might not be able to guess exactly what contract, but I'm sure with a lot of free agents, you can say he's almost certainly not going to get more than the MLE or the LLE or that he's almost certainly not going to get more than one or two years.

At a minimum, someone knowledgeable should be able to come up with a reasonable list of players who are at least 75% likely to get MLE money for at least two years or a list of some players who aren't likely to get more than a one-year deal at or near the minimum.

At least, my idea would give some structure to pointless off-season navel gazing rather than a bunch of random trade idea threads.  It would probably make more sense for the blog overlords to agree to a daily SBNation series where each blog takes a turn assessing their own team's free agents.

[Thruthelookingglass]

With you Wiggle, I find the trade post frenzy distracts me from appreciating the season and the rest of the playoffs.  That said, a lot of people dig it, and every year I gotta just keep myself from looking at the trade threads.  Ain't easy.

... only two weeks long. Right now we have discussion on a Garnett for Jefferson do-over, Ray Allen for the 3/5ths of the Charlotte Bobcats' starting line-up, and Rajon Rondo for Blake Griffin. I don't like any of those deals, unless we could pull off all three, and THEN we've got something going:

Al Jefferson/ Blake Griffin/ Leon Powe
Gerald Wallace/ Bill Walker
Emeka Okafor/ DeAndre Jordan
Paul Pierce/ Raja Bell/ J.R. Giddens
Baron Davis/ Eddie House

Which is just to say, that I'm already at a total loss.

[Jeff]

to be fair, I think people were relatively quiet on the trade ideas front between the trade deadline and the end of the playoffs - it was almost all basketball talk for that whole stretch (other than the Marbury/Moore pickups)

[The Walker Wiggle]

I'm at the point where I almost hope the Celtics do trade Ray Allen this off season only to spite all the fans falling over each other to push him out the door. (But still not really.)

I had no idea how talented he was. I had no idea that he takes care of his body as well as anyone -- never smoked or drank in his life, stays in fantastic shape, stretches every day -- or that his daily work ethic rivals any Celtic we've had in my lifetime, including Bird. Because George Karl dissed him publicly at the end of Allen's Milwaukee run, I had no idea Allen was actually a good guy and a great teammate, someone who would have a profound effect on Rondo's career. I knew he was a clutch shooter, but until you watch someone day in and day out, you can't really quantify the feeling of, "We're down three, we're on the road, but we're going to run a play for Ray Allen and he's going to freaking make this."

At age 33, he's more efficient than ever: 50-plus on 2-pointers, 41 percent on 3s, 95 percent on free throws. He has shown no signs of deterioration at all. Health permitting, he could easily play for three more years at this level and another three in the "tenured clutch guy" role that Miller perfected earlier this decade. And if you don't think his teammates respect Allen, take it from someone who watched Paul Pierce battle a Hero Complex for 10 solid years: For someone with such a healthy end-of-the-game ego like Pierce to willingly defer to a teammate at the end of games, that can only mean that teammate is special.