It seems odd to me that they're not willing to offer Tony a third year at short money, but gave Pierce 4 years guaranteed at $15mil per. If their plan is cap flexibility for 2012, Pierce's contract hurts that plan much more than Tony's would. Granted, Pierce is far more important to the Celtics plans of winning right now. But this just seems a little odd considering our painful lack of depth. It also would be nice to have a defender of Tony's caliber going up against LeBron and Wade.
But it's still early, so I'll wait to see what shakes out for the rest of the off season.
The thing is, right now the C's only have Pierce and Rondo on the books for beyond 2012. So that'd only be 26 million dollars. In today's CBA, that'd be 32 million dollars worth of space, or about two max contracts. (I know that doesn't include cap holds, but it's still a lot of space.)
Now of course, we don't know what the new salary cap will be or what new max deals will look like two years from now. And that 26 million dollar figure means that Perk, BBD, and Bradley would all be gone. So I'm not quite sure that happens.
However, even if we kept those three and upped that cap figure to something closer to 40 million dollars (with cap holds), but the point remains, we could still make a run at a big time free agent to add to Rondo and PP.
And to Mike, I agree we need some depth at the 2/3; however, I don't blame the C's IF their thinking was that they didn't want TA to be paid 3 million a year to be their 4th wing.
And as I laid out in my earlier post, in theory, we could play Pierce, Allen, and Howard all around 30 mpg and need very little out of our 4th wing (remember, there's only 96 mpg at the 2 and 3 spots combined). Now I think due to the foul trouble we'll likely face guarding Wade and James we'll need some additional depth. But I think we can probably find that at half the price.