I'll tell you what's disrespectful about it. When a team retires a player's number, it's a huge deal. It means the player was so important to the franchise that they're going to preserve his memory by never using his number again--EVER. By taking the number out of circulation, they're telling the player and the fans that there was only one Cedric Maxwell, or only one Larry Bird, etc.
If you can just "unretire" the number when another player wants it, then it shows that the original player wasn't that special after all. In this case, it's even more ridiculous because Telfair isn't even a star player on the level of Cornbread Maxwell. He's done NOTHING in his career, and yet he's asking to borrow a sacred number from out of the Celtic's storied history.
