wall_glizzy wrote:wall_glizzy wrote:nate33 wrote:Reading on Wiretap that Indy is still pursuing a S&T for Hayward. I assumed that once Hayward opted out of his player option, Boston no longer had the capability of sign-and-trading him. Maybe that's incorrect.
You usually see the S&T thing happen in RFA (as it did a bunch last season) because the incumbent team has matching rights and can leverage that into getting a second rounder or something back, like we did with Sato.
This is the other use case, where Indiana can't sign Hayward directly into open cap space and thus has to arrange a trade. Since the Celtics have Hayward's Bird Rights, they're exclusively (between them and the Pacers, or them and any other non-cap space team), capable of signing him to a deal at $25m or whatever he's looking for, and thus able to use that to demand assets for facilitating the move to Indiana.
The interesting part is that looking at Indiana's cap sheet, they don't have a lot of dud mega-deals for cap ballast. Assuming Hayward isn't taking a massive paycut, I don't see any way the salaries could match without at least one of Turner/Oladipo/Lamb/Warren/Sabonis/Brogdon coming back. But sign and trade limitations prevent the Celtics from sending any players/assets along with Hayward in the deal! It sounds like the only possibility is working out two separate transactions - the first being Hayward for... Oladipo? Turner? The second, which could execute simultaneously, would have to be the Celtics sending out desirable low-salary players and/or some draft compensation for pure salary filler from the Pacers scrap heap. Maybe this is the window the Pacers have been looking for to dump Oladipo or Turner, but it'll have to be quite a deal.
You heard it here first!
Danny Ainge, his scrooge McDuck approach is going to be the Celtics down fall.
