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O'Neal was interested in joining the Hawks over the summer. But after Atlanta balked at increasing its offer to more than the veteran's minimum salary, O'Neal signed with the Celtics for the same amount.

In addition to their reluctance to push their payroll above the luxury tax, the Hawks were concerned whether O'Neal would accept a back-up role behind center Al Horford and mesh with a relatively young team. He's one of five Celtics players with at least 12 years in the league. Link

Interesting to hear now that ATl doesn't offered him more than BOS.

What surprises me is that it's like we would have paid Luxury tax if the offer was for more than the Minimum, which is totally wrong.
ATL could offer him more than the Minimum, using BAE or part of the MLE, and stay under the threshold.

So the other argument of O'Neal being a risk behind Horford starting spot is another stupidity, because if they offered him the Minimum, they were agreeing at wanting O'Neal in the roster, and there is no reason O'Neal would have create more problem being paid 2.5M instead of the Minimum for example.

We definitely have some strange owners.

Typical Hawks, but would Shaq really improve the team anyway?

Wait, it's our fault that Shaq didn't sign with us because we only offered to pay what BOS ended up paying and we wanted to play him the way BOS is playing him now?

Seems to me that Shaq just liked BOS better and would only play for us if we overpaid and overplayed him.

parson wrote:Wait, it's our fault that Shaq didn't sign with us because we only offered to pay what BOS ended up paying and we wanted to play him the way BOS is playing him now?...

Parson, don't go on the opposite side by talking about overpaying him : we had a bit of flexibility, while BOS couldn't offer him more.
We know that teams like BOS or DAL... would have better chance.
Why not trying to offer him 2.5M ? It's not overpaying, and if he refuses, at the end, you can say "we tried everything". That's not what happened.

D21 wrote:

parson wrote:Wait, it's our fault that Shaq didn't sign with us because we only offered to pay what BOS ended up paying and we wanted to play him the way BOS is playing him now?...

Parson, don't go on the opposite side by talking about overpaying him : we had a bit of flexibility, while BOS couldn't offer him more.
We know that teams like BOS or DAL... would have better chance.
Why not trying to offer him 2.5M ? It's not overpaying, and if he refuses, at the end, you can say "we tried everything". That's not what happened.

I agree. We had options other than widely overspend or bare minimum. We have to be realistic in that we can't offer minimum and win out over Miami, Boston, Orlando, Dallas, and many other teams. That doesn't mean that we had to offer full MLE, but we could have been creative with an offer in between if the front office thinks he would make a difference.