TP for Maine.
My take on Posey - it's looking increasingly likely somebody will overpay for him. Overpaying Posey, to me, is giving him more than 3 years at the full MLE. He's crucial to the team, but they have to look at it from a business perspective - with all the money they're paying now and the need to retool in probably 3-4 years, do you want to be stuck paying Posey 7 million when he's 35? Personally, I would do that, I think you have to strike while the iron is hot. THere's no telling if we will be able to retool a couple years down the road, but we know we can win now, so let's not take out a crucial part of what got us Banner 17.
Now, despite my personal opinion, I don't think Danny will go beyond 3 years of the full MLE. I think he'd give Posey 5 years if he'd stay on non-Bird rights. But if somebody offers him 4 or 5 years starting at the full MLE, they're overpaying, and he'll have to take that amount, either from whoever's offering to overpay or from Boston. Why? Because he'd be dumb not to wrap up a 5 year, $32 million or 4 year, $26 million deal when the Celtics will only give him $22 million for 5 years (non-Bird) or 3 years (full MLE). Somebody will pony up for a 4th year at the full MLE, meaning we have to give him a 4th year. And when he could get 26 for 4 years, why would he take $22 for 5? That offer, which was my hope, will not work out.
To get him back, we'll probably have to give him the 4th year, the only hope is we ask him to leave enough of the MLE to sign Bill Walker, then he gets the remainder. That would work out to a 4 year deal starting at around $5 million (about $22.5 million total). He might take that to stay in Boston. If somebody goes for 5 years, though, we might have to let him walk. I really don't want to see that happen.
Maggette will command and receive 5 year full MLE offers. He is probably worth it - he's a legit 20 ppg player and is a few years younger than Posey. He doesn't have the D, but probably has more talent. My guess, though, is that he waits to see what the 76ers and Warriors might offer him with their cap space before deciding what to do. If he doesn't get that offer, I think he'd be more likely to go to San Antonio or even the Lakers than to come here - the small forward position is wide open in those two cities, and he can step into a starting role with a proven winning team, something that will drive his value up for next year or the year after. He could drive value up by contributing here, too, but it would likely be as a Sixth Man which gives him less of a boost in terms of league valuation.
I agree with cordobes, I think he'd pull a Posey from last year and take a 2 year deal with an opt out clause so he can get back to free agency the following year and look for a little more dough.
Interesting, it's possible we could have avoided this problem had we used the LLE instead of the MLE last year to sign Pruitt. If we had given that $650,000 of MLE money to Posey instead, we'd be able to offer him a non-Bird contract starting at $4.625 mil instead of $3.85. With 4-5 years starting at 4.625, Posey might agree to stay here and let us keep the MLE, since it's only about a million less per year and a fifth year would even it all out. But there's no way he takes close to 2 million less per year on a long term deal. So not using the LLE last year gave us $1.7 or 1.8 mil extra to play with this year, but may end up costing us the $5.5 mil MLE. Obviously there was no way to know just how well Posey would work out, and I don't blame Danny for doing things that way, but it's interesting nonetheless.
