Important to follow rules in deals
LAS VEGAS — Celtics assistant coach Scott Morrison was cruising by the Charles early one recent night, multitasking as a guest on a Maine radio show as he went.
When the subject turned to a certain free agent who’d already been reportedly headed for Boston, Morrison clammed up. (There was eventually a police presence involved, but we’ll explain that later.) Anyway, Morrison couldn’t say anything.
He still couldn’t as he led the Celts into their summer league battle (a win) against Philadelphia. Not many could. Although the Aron Baynes trade had been announced and and the Kemba Walker acquisition made its way through the league’s pipeline by the end of the night, mum was mainly the word during the day.
When the NBA moratorium was lifted at noon Saturday, it was possible a deluge
of deals could become official. Yet we got a relative trickle, and the fact is it might take several days or more for all that you already know from around the league to actually happen.
So while Enes Kanter is back in Brighton at the Celts practice facility tweeting out a video of “My first shot as a #Celtic,” nobody currently getting a paycheck from the team can breathe a word about that or any other transaction until it is officially, technically, absolutely filed and approved by the league office.
One of the major reasons teams must remain in the cone of silence is that some deals have to wait until their proper time. Because of the NBA’s semi-intricate salary cap situation, the rules under which clubs have to operate can be dependent on their proximity to the cap and luxury tax threshold.
So often a team making a move or a series of moves must execute each transaction in the proper order to attain the maximum benefit. Call it sequencing.
“When you’re a team using cap space or near the tax line, the rules are different when you’re under or over those different lines,” Celtics assistant general manager Mike Zarren told the Herald. “Some transactions you may want to do using one set of rules, and some transactions using another set of rules. So the ordering of them matters alot.
“You come up with a sequence and you plot it out, and if any step takes longer than you expect, then the other steps get held up, too.”
There’s also the fact there is another party in this tango, one with its own set of needs.
“Sometimes you’re negotiating a trade and you think it would work fine under the rules you prefer,” Zarren said. “But actually the other team has to do something else that would take them out of that first. So you don’t always get exactly the setup that you’d like.”
Even things that can seem simple require a good bit of maneuvering. For Morrison, too.
“Every couple of weeks, I do a live interview with PM Jab, a radio show on this station in Maine,” he said of the program hosted by Chris Sedenka and Javier Gorriti on Portland’s 96.3. “We usually do a few minutes of serious questions and then usually something funny after.
“So we’re near the end of the serious part and they start asking me about a potential free agent that might sign with us or allegedly might be signing with us. And I say, ‘I can’t answer that,’ and they kind of give me a hard time about it. Then I say, ‘Actually, fellas, I’m getting pulled over by the police right now for speeding.’
“I was on Storrow Drive. And they thought I was joking to get out of the question, to dodge it. And I said, ‘No, I’m actually getting pulled over.’ So I hung up, got pulled over and gave the guy my stuff. The guy let me off with a warning. He asked me what happened with the team this year, what was the problem with the team this year.
“Then the guys call me back, and they said they had a bet on whether I would get let off because I’m with the Celtics. So one guy won the bet, and then we did the rest of the interview.”
And eventually the rest of all these NBA moves that have already been reported and confirmed will get done, as well.