Steve Bulpett of the Boston Herald reports that the Celtics had to let Rodney Rogers go. Owner Paul Gaston is still a very competitive man and wants to win, but he?s committed to run the Celtics as a business. And keeping Rogers did not make good business sense. Celtics Chief Operations Officer Rich Pond explained the business aspects of the Rogers situation.

``People don't want to look at the business aspect, but we have to,'' Pond said. ``And when you're looking at our decision on Rodney, you have to look at what the numbers mean. Using raw numbers and some estimates, let's say our profit could be $10-15 million if we stay out of the luxury tax this year. I'm not sure we could have gotten Rodney for what New Jersey did (a deal starting at some $2.7 million), so let's say we had to give him the full exception of around $4.5 million. Now, if we're over the tax threshold, you double that to $9 million.

``Then by going into the luxury tax area, you're voiding your chance to get any of the tax money back. From the numbers being talked about, that could be around $5 million, so that takes you to a cost of $14 million for Rodney Rogers. We'd also lose our portion of the escrow money that comes from the players, so there's another $2 million. That means our decision to go the way we did with Rodney could have been a $16-million decision for the team.''

``In the long run, what we're looking for is some measure of fiscal sanity, and I think that's what the fans want to see, too. It requires teams to keep their financial house in order. But for now it's going to be difficult as teams get their payrolls in line.

``Once we made our decision to hold our position on the luxury tax and it was clear Rodney was going to be going elsewhere, obviously we would have preferred he'd have gone to a West Coast team,'' Pond said. ``But that was out of our control. There was a lot of talk he was going to go to Philadelphia, and that would have been painful, too. Look, everybody here likes Rodney very much. Not only Rodney, but his whole family and his agent, too. It would have been great if he'd stayed. But we had to make a business decision, and this is the one we made.''