Of course, trading Wade to the Clippers for Marcus Camby, Blake Griffin and next years' pick would require that D-Wade would agree to re-sign with the Clippers when he becomes and unrestricted free agent in the summer of 2010. Which, will NEVER happen.
Therefore I think it would be unlikely that the Clippers would give up Blake Griffin, Camby and a probable lottery pick for essentially nothing when Wade walks when the 2009-2010 season ends.
Both LBJ and Wade will either resign with their own teams or with someone who they feel they can immediately compete for a championship with.
Finally if we renouce the rights to the following guys once their contracts expire, we in fact do get under the cap becasue by renouncing their rights we eliminate the cap hold: Ray Allen, TAllen, EHouse, Daniels, Shelden > which adds up to about $26 mil off the books.
We have a very attractive team for Wade to come to for alot of reasons. If we wanted to trade for him, a package including Rondo ( a potential franchise point ) isn't a bad deal if you know you're going to lose Wade anyway.
Though, if Wade wants to come to Boston, I think we can get him without giving up Rondo.
I think our 2010 roster could very easily look like:
Perkins / Rasheed / Shelden
Garnett / Baby / Scal
Pierce / Marquis / Walker
Wade / Ray Allen / Giddens
Rondo / som "Vet min Vet" / Hudson or other...
Ray Allen re-signed for medium money or mid level money...
Wade would be a fool not to come here, especially from a career / legacy perspective. He'd be competing against Lebron in the east and Kobe in the West for a title the next 3-4 years and still be just approaching 30-31..
LeBron I think is far less likely.
But of course I do wear green tinted glasses and am a hopeless optimist.
I'm sorry, but that's just not true. Money off the books does not equal money under the cap when you are already very far over the cap.
http://members.cox.net/lmcoon/salarycap.htmhttp://forums.celticsblog.com/index.php?topic=28668.0For the sake of argument, let's say that the salary cap is around 56,000,000 this year. Remember, it's a soft cap because teams can exceed the cap with:
1. the MLE (worth about 5.5 million the first year plus raises thereafter) (Example: Rasheed Wallace)
2. Bird Rights exceptions, allowing teams to essentially go over the cap to ensure that they can keep their own players (example: Glen Davis's extension)
3. Trading one player for another as long as their salaries are within 125% of each other (for example, you could trade a player making 4 mil for one making 5; if you were exactly at the cap now you'd be 1 million over.)
Well, the celtics' payroll right now is 81,555,128. Very far over that 56 mil mark.
Now let's assume, generously, the cap stays the same and doesn't drop to 51-54 mil like it's projected to. Real quick math:
The salaries of Pierce, KG, Perk, Wallace, and Davis all total 54,058,093. This means that if you renounced the rights of: Rajon Rondo, Ray Allen, Tony Allen, JR Giddens, Bill Walker, Scalabrine, Eddie House and Sheldon Williams, you would be far enough under the cap to offer Wade or another free agent a starting salary of:
$2,000,000.
Remember that a max offer for Wade (which he will receive) is going to start at around 17,000,000.
So in order to add wade, we would have to renounce Ray and Rondo, and hope that Wade takes a 15,000,000 pay cut. Then we'd have to hope that Rondo and Ray will resign for a combined 5.5 million dollars or so (the MLE), because when you renounce a player you can no longer use bird rights to go over the cap.
Therefore the only way we can add a 2010 free agent is:
1. Sign and trade, which is incredibly unlikely because we'd have to put together a better package than anyone else in the league could make, or
2. Renounce Rondo, Ray, and anyone else we can AND have pierce decide he doesn't want 21,000,000.