Getting Paid: What Some Notorious Celtic Draft Busts (and others) Have Made

I loved Pricning Boy's bit yesterday about draft busts. Mainly, I liked the stuff about how much cash the guys have made in their careers, basically proving the point that you can be a sucky NBA player and still get PAID. With that in mind and thanks to the invaluable basketball-reference.com I decided to peruse through their pages to see a few things:

1) Of the great Celtic draft busts from the Rick Pitino/Chris Wallace Era, who has made the most and who has made the least.

2) What have notoriously outrageously paid guys made for their careers?

3) Who has made more, Ray Allen or Paul Pierce?

4) How do these guys stack up against notoriously high paid baseball players?

The answers....

Infamous Celtic Draft Busts:

(We gotta get this started with the 2001 draft. The botched draft by which all other botched drafts must be measured.)

Joseph Forte - $1.95M over a whopping 25 career games. This was of course the infamous "Ode to Red" pick where the Celtics selected him over Tony Parker because Red was infatuated with Forte's game. WHOOPS! Furthermore, Forte gains even more distinction for being the worst pick of the Celtics 2001 draft, a pretty tall order considering Kedrick Brown was also involved.

Kedrick Brown - $7.26M over a 4 year career which ended in Philly in 2005. Kedrick Brown was a poor man's Tony Allen and without Kedrick Brown, my dislike of Tony Allen would probably have been much more tempered. You see their games were basically the same - all athlete, no basketball player - and their supposed value on the court came in their coach seeing them as defensive stoppers. While Tony Allen is definitely better than Kedrick, the lasting scars of all those times Kedrick bricked threes from the corner and looked totally lost in all walks of basketball on the court just hit too close to home with Allen's game. Because of this, I've pretty much said since day one with Tony, "trade this guy because he is a rich man's Kedrick Brown". I still for the record stand 110% by that statement.

Joe Johnson - $45.78 over 7 years (and counting). OK, so Joe Johnson is by no means a draft bust. As we saw in the Atlanta series this year, he is a really, really good player. I put him in here just because I need to keep it real and cannot just show the bad of the Celtics 2001 draft. I need to tell the whole story. And what is the whole story? Well the Celtics could have traded Kedrick Brown or Joe Johnson to Phoenix in 2002 (along with scrubs and a 1st round pick) for Rodney Rogers and Tony Delk. They elected to trade Johnson instead of Brown. Once again, WHOOPS! The Celtics don't make the Eastern Conference Finals that year without that trade so I'm not critical of the idea of the trade. However, the choice of who to trade certainly opens the door up for the pile of rightful criticism it has received.

And there you have the Celtics 2001 draft, recapped. For fun, they could have had Richard Jefferson, Troy Murphy, or even Zach Randolph over Kedrick Brown and Tony Parker or Gilbert Arenas instead of Joseph Forte. Obviously, those are a couple of horrible decisions. Conversely, at least when thinking on the draft itself and not the trade that came later, the Celtics did take Joe Johnson, one of only three first rounders from that year and five players total to make an All Star team. The other All Stars from that draft are Pau Gasol (3), Tony Parker (28), Gilbert Arenas (31), and Mehmet Okur (38).

And now the other biggy from the Pitino/Wallace Era, the one and Only Jerome Moiso! I'm not going to get into the 1997 draft here (Billups and Mercer) just because they were not draft busts per se. Sure they did zero to help the Celtics win anything - unless you consider trading Chauncey Billups for Kenny Anderson "helping" - but obviously Billups has had plenty of success elsewhere and say whahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gift you will about Mercer but he did average 13.6 PPG over a nine year career that earned him $35.23M. Trying to lump those guys in to an article about draft busts just isn't right. Jerome Moiso on the other hand...

Jerome Moiso - $7.14M over a 5 year carer where he averaged about 3 points and 3 rebounds per game. What more can you say? The Celtics drafted him 11th in 2000 and while there certainly were some good enough guys taken after him, there really are not any players that have you drooling "what if???". This draft produced only three All Stars, Kenyon Martin (1), Jamaal Magloire (19), and Michael Redd (43) and of those three, the only guy that you'd really want on your team today is Redd. For as much as Moiso sucked, it is really tough killing the Celtics for this pick when you look at the . But then you realize that even if the guys taken after him were not and are not stars, they still have a place in the league as opposed to Jerome who is no longer around. Bottom line, you can't take a guy with the 11th pick, see him average 3 and 3 over the duration of an undistinguished career and not call him a bust.

Now for some more fun, let's check in on career earnings:

Michael Jordan - $93.8M over 16 years ($63.28M of that coming in 1997 and 1998)

Antoine Walker - $99.3M over 12 years

Gary Payton - $104.8M over 17 years

Reggie Miller - $105.1M over 19 years

T-Mac - $116.7 over 11 years

Allen Houston - $117.6M over 12 years

Tim Duncan - $122.1 over 11 years

Grant Hill - $126.1 over 14 years

Kobe Bryant - $127.1 over 12 years

Stephon Marbury - $130.3M over 12 years

Allen Iverson - $132.5M over 12 years

Chris Webber - $177M over 15 years

KG - $210.2 over 13 years

Shaq - $251.6M over 16 years

Crazy right? Look at those earnings. Can you think of anybody that could top C-Webb/KG/Shaq that I forgot?

Pierce vs. Allen:

Paul Pierce - $85.6M over 10 years

Ray Allen - $120.9M over 12 years

Can you believe that difference?! $35M!!! Crazy!

Now Some Baseball Players:

Mike Hampton - $106.6M over 15 years

Roger Clemens - $121M over 21 years

Ken Griffey Jr. - $139.1M over 19 years

Derek Jeter - $139.6M over 12 years

Mannny Ramirez - $143.4M over 15 years

Greg Maddux - $143.8M over 20 years

Randy Johnson - $152.4M over 19 years

A-Rod - $170.4M over 14 years

Barry Bonds - $188.2M over 22 years


Did I miss anybody? Keep in mind that these figures are just through 2007 so most of those guys will see significant bumps to their number at the end of the year. Probably the most shocking to me is the fact that Greg Maddux has significantly out-earned Roger Clemens. That, and how much Jeter has made in a relatively short time period. Everything else seems about right as crazy as that may sound. Still, I'd like to check back in on all these things after the baseball season.

This whole exercise was a lot of fun for me, I hope you enjoyed it.