Is Bass overpaid. Arguably, although he's very near the average NBA salary, so I'm not sure.
But Bass had leverage. The Celtics options were Bass or someone for the NBA minimum. And Bass had played very very well the prior season, so he was going to get more than the minimum from someone.
The only signing from last offseason that bothers me with hindsight is Courtney Lee. He was completely disappointing, and we sent off Moore and 3 second rounders, including #32, which we'd love to get back, for him. The Celtics would have been better off keeping Moore and signing someone else for the minimum to help fill the void while Bradley was out, rather than signing Lee to a four-year deal. While I was excited about it at the time, I really shouldn't have been, as Danny overreacted to losing Ray and having Bradley on the shelf for a two months.
It's really hard to say what we should have done last season. We were just coming off an ECF where we had two chances to go to the finals and we lost one of our main pieces. Signing Terry made a lot of sense at the time and Bass is a very decent playoff performer, as he plays hard half-court defense and can knock down the mid-range jumper. Guys like Lee, Green, Avery, and Sully were supposed to be the next generation working alongside the curren leaders.
Honestly, our team didn't look a whole lot different than San Antonio does now...and, frankly, the exact same result occurred to both of us - losing to the Heat in games 6 and 7. Theirs just happened to be in the finals.
It's easy to look back and second guess Danny's decisions, but the only real issue I had was the length of contracts for Terry and Bass...Lee was supposed to be a relatively key piece to the future.
I guess my argument about Lee is this: They already had signed Terry to a 3-year deal, and had Bradley. Lee, even if he offered a slightly different game than Terry and Bradley, played the same position. Maybe the proper move would have been signing Lee to a 4-year deal with the mid-level and passing on Terry -- I don't really know. I just think if I weren't looking through green goggles, like I was last summer, that I wouldn't have liked the Lee signing, since it meant you were wasting either the $5 million committed to Terry a month earlier, or the $5 million and other assets committed to Lee. Neither of them could be an effective backup for Rondo, which was known at the time, and became pretty apparent once Rondo went down. Nor had Bradley shown the ability to backup Rondo either.
I know we were close to beating the Heat the year before, but our regular season was nothing like the Spurs, either last year or this year. And while Lee may have been our version of Danny Green, we paid him $1.5 mil more per season. Duncan gets paid $2 mil less than Garnett. Diaw gets $1.5 mil less than Bass. They were able to release Jackson, who was paid over $10 mil, because they didn't like his attitude, and still stay under the luxury tax. This year they're not going to have any trouble adding one more piece at the full mid-level, and still be under the luxury tax, while, assuming no major trades, we're going to only have the tax-payer mid-level, be over the luxury tax, and have issues avoiding the repeater tax rate the following off-season. Maybe a healthy Rondo makes us better, but a healthy Rondo had us around .500 for the first half of the season, so I'm not convinced.
Anyway, the problem is that most of our players are a little overpaid. Not extremely overpaid, but enough to matter in the aggregate, and we're feeling that this offseason. We had an unsuccessful season, and have little maneuverability to make any improvements, unless it's a wholesale upheaval of the roster. We're locked into the luxury tax, also without major upheaval, which means that the following two offseasons there will probably be greater imperative to stay under the luxury tax. Even with Pierce coming off the books in 2014, it will be interesting to see if we can afford to keep Bradley. And there will still be no room for someone at the mid-level.
The Spurs do not have this problem, so if we tried to emulate them, we did a bad job. Blame Lee, Terry, or Bass, but one of those contracts put us behind the 8-ball. Considering he was signed last and his contract is a year longer, I'm blaming Lee.
