Today marks the official start of free agency. Players can sign. Coaches and general managers can talk about their new guys. The floodgates have opened -- but not here.

''There are no floodgates for us,'' Celtics basketball boss Danny Ainge said yesterday after catching some action at the Reebok Summer League at UMass-Boston. ''We're going to have to wait to see who's still in the water at the end.''

Did I miss something? Has Paul Gaston repurchased the Celtics and no one told me about it? Ainge's remarks bring to mind the classic Bob Hope line when he hosted the Oscars in 1968: ''Welcome to the Academy Awards, or, as it's known in my house, Passover.''

Here we are, a year removed from the Silly Summer of 2002, when Chris Wallace had his hands tied by ownership and couldn't re-sign Rodney Rogers. Here we are, a year later, with new owners, a new basketball operations chief, and, still, we are hearing the same, sad song: We won't spend the money.

And this lament comes after April's Atlas-boosted ticket price increases. For what? A rookie point guard joining the same team from last year? While the Nets have added Alonzo Mourning and the Magic have added Juwan Howard?

''We don't have the middle-class exception to spend, so we're going to have to wait,'' Ainge said yesterday. He's wrong. They do have the middle-class exception, which works out to nearly $5 million. Even with the NBA salary cap increasing to about $44 million -- a jump of about 9 percent -- ownership has decided that money, which could be used to sign a decent free agent or two, will likely go unspent because the Celtics don't want to be paying more of a luxury tax than they would otherwise pay.