The Alien is Back, so who's out?
Sam Cassell said that he's going to be back in Celtic green next season. I thought his play last year at times was laughable because of how quickly he shot the ball but I'll take him as a third string PG.
The real question, though, is who isn't going to be around come opening night? The Celtics already had 15 men under contract and now will need to jettison one player. The obvious pick seemed like Bill Walker but all word out of the front office is that not only will he be on the team but he'll be a contributor.
Darius Miles? Even if Darius doesn't make the team, I think the Celtics are going to need to find another SF because right now, the roster is slim at that spot. Bill Walker can get some minutes and Tony Allen could play some spot time there but you'd like to have a big body to go up against LeBron James.
The same goes for Patrick O'Bryant. If we cut him, we need to find someone else to shore up the bench. We'd have Leon Powe as our backup center.
The likely choice would seem to be Gabe Pruitt. Personally, I was never really sold on Pruitt but there's really no reason to keep him around if we already have Tony Allen and JR Giddens backing up the 2 spot and House and Cassell backing up the point. I don't think we can just send Pruitt to Europe since he's already under contract so it might be adios to Mr. Pruitt.
Could there be a trade in the works? Possibly but probably not likely. I know that a lot of fans enjoy coming up with Brian Scalabrine deals but Veal is fairly tough to move unless we take on a bad contract. And seeing that we weren't willing to give James Posey a fourth year on his contract, it would seem odd that we'd deal Veal for a contract that ran that long. And if that's the case, there really aren't that many contracts that are around Veal's numbers and only one year longer than teams are dying to get rid of.
It should be interesting to see how this all shakes out because even with 16 people on the roster, I wouldn't be stunned if Danny Ainge had a few more moves up his sleeves.
