wutang112878 said:
I dont think the cost control of the rookie deals really matters that much. The value of a #1 pick isnt that he costs $4M it should be that he is talented, even if that salary were to double to $8M I dont think the value really diminishes that much if the player is a real building block.
If the Celts stand pat then its not a couple of years, its a FA or 2 with the cap space and then the talent infusion with the 2016-18 picks. Surely they wont completely stand pat, but I dont see us getting a player of real consequence where we use a pick 3 years down the road as a major chip. Take Love, I doubt the T-Wolves would have traded him for a great pick 2 years down the road because the GM making that deal might not be making the pick if he is looking that far into the future.
Isn't this essentially saying that if the Celtics don't rebuild then it'll take a long time to rebuild?
In the last 4 years, the NBA has changed drastically but, for some reason, there's still a tendency to look to the distant past as an example of how long it'll take to rebuild. The last CBA decreased the length of maximum contracts, which resulted in a huge increase in player movement and the new TV deal is going to result in a much larger cap number. Every summer in the NBA is now a crazy flurry of player movement, and teams have become extremely creative when it comes to creating space. With a few notable outliers (the Nets, etc.), most NBA franchises now understand that they can, easily, position themselves to have the flexibility to make a major move anytime the opportunity presents itself. And in a lot of ways, what Ainge has done over the last 2 years epitomizes this approach.
So my point is not that the C's can trade a first round pick in 2021 for a star player, but that they can go out and sign star players and use those picks as a means of adding cost controlled talent. Or that they can trade their own picks in the coming years--picks that aren't years off--for highly paid, star caliber players and know that their future picks give them the ability to add cost-controlled talent around those players. There's huge value in that, and we've already seen that smart organizations are very hesitant to move 1st round picks. That hesitancy will only increase as the value of those picks increases with the increase in the cap. First round picks will soon take up only a small fraction of the cap. That makes them far more valuable both in theory and practice, regardless of whether the player drafted becomes an all-star or a role player.
This goes back to the argument I had with everybody in the Kevin Love thread. The majority of people seemed to feel that Love would cost too many of the C's assets and that it would be impossible to build around him since he'd cost 1/3rd of the cap--and I insisted that the cap would increasing rapidly and that it wouldn't be that difficult to build around him. The new TV deal announcement proved my point--to a degree that I never even could have imagined. The Celtics have very little long-term money committed and the cap will increase exponentially very soon. They are flush with first round picks. They have young talent. There's nothing at all limiting their flexibility right now, and acquiring a pick that's 4 years out doesn't indicate a 4 year plan it just means that Ainge recognizes how valuable those picks will be with the new cap and he's trying to hoard them before the league's slowest GMs catch up.
That said, it's important to note that this is all just Simmons' speculation and I don't think the Knicks actually make that deal to begin with. Maybe they do--we've yet to see how Dolan vs. Phil will actually play out--but if it's true that Phil's been given 100% control and Dolan's out on basketball decisions, I don't see this deal going down.