Celtics offered Mikki Moore a contract!

[Andy Jick]

Patrick O'Moore...

please tell me there is a better plan...

[wdleehi]

Considering that many here wanted someone like Elson, and where quite vocal about it, I really don't see what problem you guys have with adding someone like Mikki Moore.

Elson was a roll player off the bench for a title winning team.


He is a better defender.



What the Celtics really need out of a backup C is the ability to get hands in the face of the other teams C.  Moore, while tall, seems to allow those players to flourish. 

Funny. I thought that the main problem with Elson was that he was a poor defender, and why often he got benched by Pop.

Still a better defender then Moore. 

[winsomme]

That's unfortunate.

So...  are people willing to admit that Danny's "plan" wasn't brilliant after all, and that the off-season was a mess?  I think he's a pretty good GM, too, and the title last season was magnificent.  This year, though, has been...  lackluster.

Yes. But his options were much more limited. Once he decided to wait for Posey to search for that fourth year it left him with far fewer options than I liked.

My hope is that this contract is a minimum offer and that it will not preclude us from pursuing Joe Smith were he to become available. Joe Smith is enough of a superior player that I hope they'd pay to have both if he were to shake lose.

It was actually pretty easy to see in the summer what's going on here. We're watching our pennies and nickels, and that's the priority, not a title.

Sure is easy to be mad about it when they aren't your nickels. The team committed a ton of money and to being above the luxury tax for last year and the next several to try and win. To criticize every subsequent move as penny pinching seems to be missing the big picture. The one that includes three max level players.

Money is a factor in their decision making, but I firmly believe winning is their priority.

whose nickels are they, Faf, if the team doesn't make it past (or even to) the ECF?

I still firmly believe that even if the main reasoning is financial, the worst money decision this ownership could make would be to not make it at least back to the Finals.

how much money is lost on 4-8 more sold out home playoff games?

if that was the rationale, then they were being (as the saying goes) "penny wise and pound foolish." The revenue that they would see from another Title would certainly outweigh the contracts to the last couple bench players.

Just start watching CLE and ORL. These teams are not going to be easy outs. Then you have some upstarts like CHI, MIA, ATL.....This could be another very scary playoff run.

One thing that could be possible is that maybe the Cs didn't offer him very much. The article doesn't say where our offer was amongst the several Moore appeared to get. Maybe they just tossed out a low-ball offer...who knows?

also, maybe the priority is still Marbury and they want to save more money to offer him that wouldn't be there if they had to spend more to get Smith....

I don't know. Let's see how this plays out.

[Snakehead]

I don't see what he really brings to this team.  Even if Joe Smith is an impossibly long shot I'd rather just hang out there and wait to scoop him up if a buyout happens.  With Moore you're bringing in a guy who won't really do anything that Powe and Davis can't do.  He has more experience sure but I don't know what the guy has really proved over his career.

[nickagneta]

TP's go out to CoachBo, Wide Load and Roy who along with myself have been telling people since before this season began that Danny's offseason was awful. At times it seems we were the only ones that saw it. Can you people now see what we were all talking about?

Wide Load thought it was a bad off season but thought that Danny would change the roster before the playoffs started. That's still possible and maybe Danny adds Mikki Moore, Joe Smith and Marbury and the Celtics go on to win it. Maybe the Celtics as currently constructed get so much out of their current top 8 that they win it all anyway. it's possible considering just how well that starting five play together and individually.

But none of that means that we can't judge what Danny did from the time the Celtics won the championship last year until opening night this year as bad. He messed up big time. Either he seriously misread the market or he seriously mishandled the Posey situation or his entire offseason strategy was flawed from the start. I happen to think the last part is true and that he should never have persued Posey and went instead after prove vets to fill certain roles.

All that said, Mikki Moore is an upgrade over POB and can, with this team, be a much more effective backup center than BBD. BBD had been playing extremely well there for a good two month stretch but has definitely back pedaled a bit the last 2-3 weeks. If Perk gets into early foul trouble, I would feel a lot more comfortable with Moore going in there to play 5-6 minutes in the 1st or 3rd quarters with the starters than I would BBD.

I think Moore, playing with the other 4 starters could be extremely effective in that he plays a tough, physical game and his strengths are rebounding and shot blocking. BBD could still come in in the 2nd and 4th quarters with Perk getting his usual end of the 2nd and 4th quarter time slots. I think Moore's role of coming in as a replacement early in the 1st and 3rd quarters when Perk is in foul trouble would be an outstanding , definitive, role for him that he could excel at.

[BudweiserCeltic]

I myself like the Mikki Moore pickup if it happens. He should be adequate against lengthy centers, kinda like the ones the Lakers have and the Cavs. Against strong ones, we still have Baby in there that has done a fairly good job against them. I really don't see so much of the down side some of you are seeing. It'll be up to the coaching staff to find the appropiate matchups.

If someone better becomes available, then go for it. But Mikki is really no different than many of the suggested players that have been brought up throughout the season by people here.

[Change]

Me like very much.
Moore is going to be fine no worries. He's like 7feet version of eddie house. He will bring energy off the bench & hopefully block some shots and grab some rebounds. I see the reason for Ainge for not waiting, get moore & teach him the system these 20 something games remaining.

[winsomme]

I don't see what he really brings to this team.  Even if Joe Smith is an impossibly long shot I'd rather just hang out there and wait to scoop him up if a buyout happens.  With Moore you're bringing in a guy who won't really do anything that Powe and Davis can't do.  He has more experience sure but I don't know what the guy has really proved over his career.

I agree about rolling the dice with Joe Smith.

another way to look at this is: how much of an upgrade is Mikki Moore over Scott Pollard?

Why can't we just wait and see on Smith and then grab a guy like Pollard if that falls through.

I actually think he would at the very least bring the toughness that PJ brought last year.

[Gomesfan]

The guys has played great, ever since he left the Celtics.

[cordobes]

I really don't see how it makes sense to grade an off-season before a season is over.  If we had lost to the Lakers last year, everyone would've been screaming that Danny didn't put enough peices around the Big Three to win a title.

Well people are saying that this year, but what happens if, and I know this is mind-blowing, the actually win it again this year??  Can you really say a championship team had a bad off season??

Of course you can.  You don't judge decisions simply on results.  Some times, good decisions lead to poor results (due to outside factors), and other times bad decisions lead to good results.  As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20.  That's why I think it's fair to judge things contemporaneously. 

I thought the whole point of a season was to win a championship??  There's no way you're going to tell me that if the Celtics win the title this year, they had a bad off season.  Unless they signed huge, crippling contracts, it just doesn't make sense.  And they haven't done that.

I'm not saying Danny has put the best team together that he possibly could've.  And truthfully, we have no way of knowing that.  We don't know what players could've been had.  Chris Andersen and a number of other players would've been better than O'Bryant in hindsight, and maybe a guy like Matt Barnes would've been a better pickup than TA.  But we don't know which players had a desire to come to Boston.

Well, it depends on what you think was Ainge's job this off-season: maximize/increase this team chances of winning more titles; or just keep the team competitive enough to have a chance of winning the title (and that's all you need to win it all).

If you believe it was the second one, than he did a good job and you don't need to wait for the outcome to know that - this team still has a chance of winning the championship. But it's very hard for a GM to transform a championship team into a team with no chance of repeating though, so I don't know how useful is your standard.

[Gomesfan]

Celtics signed him to a 10 day contract from 1/6/03-1/16/03 then I think he went to the Atl for the remainder of the season, then he bounced around for a couple of years and landed in NJ where he kinda broke out.

           Min Games Rebounds Points
NJ  06-07  26.5  79    5.1      9.8

Sac 07-08  29.1  82    6        8.5

Sac 08-09  16.2  42     3.3     3.5

This last year in Sac Hawes , Miller and Hawes are sharing minutes with Hawes eating into Mikki's.

[CelticsWhat35]

I really don't see how it makes sense to grade an off-season before a season is over.  If we had lost to the Lakers last year, everyone would've been screaming that Danny didn't put enough peices around the Big Three to win a title.

Well people are saying that this year, but what happens if, and I know this is mind-blowing, the actually win it again this year??  Can you really say a championship team had a bad off season??

Of course you can.  You don't judge decisions simply on results.  Some times, good decisions lead to poor results (due to outside factors), and other times bad decisions lead to good results.  As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20.  That's why I think it's fair to judge things contemporaneously. 

I thought the whole point of a season was to win a championship??  There's no way you're going to tell me that if the Celtics win the title this year, they had a bad off season.  Unless they signed huge, crippling contracts, it just doesn't make sense.  And they haven't done that.

I'm not saying Danny has put the best team together that he possibly could've.  And truthfully, we have no way of knowing that.  We don't know what players could've been had.  Chris Andersen and a number of other players would've been better than O'Bryant in hindsight, and maybe a guy like Matt Barnes would've been a better pickup than TA.  But we don't know which players had a desire to come to Boston.

Well, it depends on what you think was Ainge's job this off-season: maximize/increase this team chances of winning more titles; or just keep the team competitive enough to have a chance of winning the title (and that's all you need to win it all).

If you believe it was the second one, than he did a good job and you don't need to wait for the outcome to know that - this team still has a chance of winning the championship. But it's very hard for a GM to transform a championship team into a team with no chance of repeating though, so I don't know how useful is your standard.

When did I say that Ainge has done a good job this off season?  I never said that.  I just don't see the reasoning behind claiming it was a horrible off season when the season is still going on.  Especially before we even know what the playoff roster is going to be.

I think there's a lot of revisionist history from posters who think Danny did a great job last year putting the right pieces around Danny.  As far up as the first round of the playoffs, when we were having trouble with the Hawks, people were screaming at Danny saying that he didn't put enough players around The Big Three.  But winning has a funny way of making people forget all that.

[cordobes]

(...)
I think Moore, playing with the other 4 starters could be extremely effective in that he plays a tough, physical game and his strengths are rebounding and shot blocking.

I've seen this often repeated these last few days. But Moore is not a good shot-blocker. Never was and never will be.

MM has career averages of 0.6 blocks per game, 1.1 per 36 minutes and a Blk% of 2.3%. And he has been declining, so this season he's averaging 0.3, 0.7 and 1.4%. These are not even average numbers.

Just for the sake of comparison, Joe Smith, who isn't a shot-blocker either, averages 0.7 per game, 1.4 per 36, 2.8 blk% this season - basically doubling Moore's numbers.

Scot Pollard averaged 0.7 per game, 1.5 per 36, 2.9 blk%. Even the extremely undersized Leon Powe is currently a better shot-blocker than Mikki Moore.

[jdpapa3]

Some of you guys are blatantly showing that you did not watch Mikki play with the Nets. The guy will look great with our stars.

[Andy Jick]

i seem to recall another guy (who's name i won't mention) that played great for the Nets and then danny broke the bank for him here...