Danny Ainge is perhaps the least Celtic of all, and like some of the best Celtics players in history, he has the toughness, toughness, cunning, and insatiable thirst for victory, while being a member of the Green Shirts family, he is more of a businessman. If Auerbach is a patriarch, then Danny Angie is the president of a real commercial team, and everything is in line with interests. So when Arenas showed enough talent, Angie immediately showed Leon that he had made a mistake in the draft, and agreed to Leon's plan to propose a trade to get Anderson.

If it were Auerbach, some of the principles he adhered to would not be easily changed in any way. That's why to this day there are no cheerleaders on the Celtics' home court, because the serious bishops don't like the presence of teenage girls with thighs on Boston's parquet floors.

So, the stubborn Auerbach left all the dealings to Angie, Wallace, and Leon, knowing that some of the things he was good at and insisted on in the past were no longer suitable for the new era. The best player in Celtics' history to acquire through a trade or free signing is Robert Parish, who is not even in the top 10 in the Celtics' star-studded star book. All of their brilliance comes from the draft, and the cardinals' sinister or ingenious tactics before the draft.

Nowadays, these things are useless, the rapid development of the media, the pervasiveness of scouts, so that those black-box robbery methods have nothing to hide, and the league's various transactions and draft rules make the probability of unfair transactions such as the champion winning the champion and the list eye, and five dime for five dollars getting lower and lower. Although Auerbach, who was in full swing in the 80s, turned the NBA's salary cap into a soft salary cap and created the Bird Clause, a far-reaching trade signing rule, but then there were more and more restrictions on team wages and transactions, until the 1999 shutdown, when labor and management renegotiated the wage agreement. There is now a new Collective-Bargaining-Agreement, also known as CBA. The agreement is extremely complex, and with new rules being revised every year, the first thing any team staff member who wants to trade will have to deal with is the 435-page CBA Clause Handbook, which has nearly 100 pages of additional clauses.

But for Leon, this thick manual has seen his general content as early as his first NBA draft. Now that he has been in the NBA for two years and has participated in many trades, he has long been familiar with every clause in the book, the source of the clauses, and the actionable content, so when Danny Ainge is in the office and Leon to discuss the content of the trade, there is no need to read the fine print or the player contract, there is a living dictionary in front of him.

"I don't think the salary cap will go up next year, it's not the same as in previous years, and there are no big fish on the free agency market next year, and the salary cap is going to go down and there are no good free agents, so sooner or later this trend will be seen. Therefore, we must look at the next year, which is the most important node. This is more profitable than trading, but it takes longer to wait. At this time, Leon had been consulting with him in Anji's office for more than an hour. His trade plan was to trade the team's two junk contracts for one junk contract for the Nuggets, which expired in 2004 but would have a team option in '03 to free up salary space for the Celtics.

And as the price of eating the junk contract and the bargaining chip for the trade balance, Chris Wallace will join the deal. Of course, the Celtics will need to pay a future second-round pick for this.

For such a way of trading, Angie is a little hesitant, what he hesitates is not the operability of the transaction, he believes that the calculation of Leon and Morey will not be biased. He's just weighing the salary for his comeback and whether the price of a draft pick is worth it, after all, as the team's president he needs to consider more aspects, including public opinion and the support of the rest of the team. Leon wants to send Walter McCarty, Randy Brown, and the French forward who gets the Nuggets, Tariq Abdou Wahad.

Angie has no opinion on the exchange of Randy Brown and McCass, who is already at the end of his career and has contributed less and less to the team. It's just that Angie is worried that not long ago, he just encouraged Brown to take the lead in the operation to force O'Brien to the palace, and now that the operation is over, he will be traded to unload the mill and kill the donkey, and Angie has to be careful.

Walter McCarty is even more troublesome, he came to the Celtics as early as 1997 and has worked here for 5 years, although the statistics are declining year by year, but he is also the old man of the team. And as a 6-foot-10 interior lineman, he is also an important rotation for the team's power forward position, but averaging two or three rebounds per game is really not enough, which is why Carroll would rather use the 40-year-old Rodman than him.

The balance of Anji's inner emotions and interests is wavering, and the reasons given by Leon are very sufficient, especially his prediction of the salary cap next season, but Angie still needs a little reason to make up her mind. He looked at Chris Wallace, the general manager who was sitting on the sidelines, he had been filing his nails and not expressing an opinion, he was noncommittal about Leon's opinion, in fact, Wallace is already a die-hard supporter of Leon, but he didn't show it concretely. As soon as Angie agrees, he will call Vanderwig to request a trade and immediately escalate it to the NBA league office. When he saw Angie looking at him, he beckoned to Morey beside him and said, "Darryl, tell Danny what you think." ”

Morey cleared his throat and said that there were not many opportunities to make a decisive statement in front of the president, saying: "You should know that the impact of 911 is all-encompassing, not only our stock market, real estate, but also the sports consumer market has ushered in a recession. Part of the reason for Michael Jordan's comeback is that the league hopes that his return can withstand the impact of the terrorist attacks on the ball market, but at the moment, the Wizards have a poor record and the ball market is generally in a state of decline. So, the possibility of a drop in the salary cap that Mr. Leon said is very high, and as the season progresses, more and more teams will realize it, and then the expiring contracts of Brown and McCarty will not have that much value. ”

The decline in the salary cap and the lack of big-name free agents will make the free market in 2002 a backwater, so it is better to look at the turbulent year of 2003, when not only will there be many big fish in the free market, but the draft of that year is expected to have a large influx of talented players, which is a good opportunity for the Celtics to show their skills and turn around in one fell swoop. After all, Morey's graduation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Leon's street gangster background are obviously more convincing than his background as a street gangster, although Angie also knows that Leon, a street boxer, does not know where to learn his excellent knowledge of finance and accounting, which often makes him feel ashamed as a professional team manager.

In the end, Angie finally nodded, which not only meant that he agreed to the deal, but also that he accepted Leon's strategy and set his sights on 2003.

……………………

On the morning of December 5th, Chris Anderson, who was staying at a hotel in Indianapolis, woke up early and felt that everything in life was beautiful because he was a real NBA player. It's been more than a week since he signed with the Nuggets, and it's still hard for him to believe that his dream of becoming a professional player comes true with a contract with an annual salary of 290,000 in his hand. He has decided to buy a house in Texas for his mother, who had worked hard to raise him, and like many NBA players, his father abandoned them early.

In fact, before he was signed by Denver, he always thought that he would become a Celtics player, and the scout from Boston named Leon was very impressed, he didn't expect this guy to know China so well, and he also appreciated his talent. Judging by the way he dressed, he was not a dogmatic fellow, and his long hair was the envy of Anderson, so he began to renew his hair from the summer, and now his hair was almost up to his shoulders.

Today, he's heading to Boston with the team to take on the Celtics, the second leg of their Eastern Conference road trip, where they were blown out by the Pacers led by Reggie Miller and Jermaine O'Neal at Conseco Arena last night. Anderson still hasn't had much of a chance to play, and he's watched as a genius like Jermaine O'Neal took in the game and scored 25 points on the inside, but who made the gap between the two that big.

Anderson has long learned to comfort himself, he has long recognized his own value in the days of wandering and playing, a small role that is not too inconspicuous, he does jump very high, but basketball is not useful just jumping high. He still remembers his time in Nanjing, where he had taught him a lot, and although he was still immature, he was able to cope with all kinds of changes in the world.

"Chris, you've been traded, and it's just in time that you're about to fly to Boston, which is going to be your new home. Say goodbye to your teammates on the plane. Anderson received a call from his agent and was told to trade to the Boston Celtics.

He still didn't expect the world to change so quickly.