The NBA season is just a few days away, meaning it's about that time to speculate on how many games under .500 the Celtics will finish.
My guess is a generous ten.
It's been a while since Boston had a winning season, the last time being 1992-93, the year following Larry Bird's retirement. But while the '90s ? especially the late '90s ? were years of basketball mediocrity in Boston, Rick Pitino was correct in venting to reporters last season that neither Bird, Kevin McHale, nor Robert Parrish are taking the floor for the once-glorious franchise.
But while Pitino cannot be blamed for three years of sub-.500 basketball, he certainly cannot expect Boston fans to have much patience left. The motley group of players that he and management have assembled ? led by Antoine Walker, Paul Pierce, and Kenny Anderson ? cannot be made into a playoff team. And if the Celtics are to start a rebuilding process that actually leads back to the playoffs, it must begin with buying new Birds or McHales, as shallow as it sounds. Pitino, a natural control freak at the college level, where the honing of young talent is the name of the game, must understand that maturation and development in the NBA pales in comparison to dishing out big bucks for high-profile players.
And Celtics fans, tell me it doesn't drive you crazy when the C's announce all these huge free agent signings, like Chris Carr and Randy Brown.
The Celtics have a couple of names in Walker and Pierce that would be powerful second or third options on any championship team. But Walker has been in Boston for four years, and if he was the player to lead the Celtics back to a .500 season, he would have done so already. He lacks the consistency on the court and the personality off the court to be a leader in any sense of the word. Indiana wanted him to play third fiddle to Reggie Miller and Jalen Rose, but all they were offering was Austin Croshere. So he stays with the Celtics, but also with the undeserved burden of carrying the team on his back.
Pierce is the team's best player, a reliable 15-plus points a night, and will likely be around for a while. But these two guys cannot be expected to match up with other Atlantic top twos, like Grant Hill and Tracy McGrady, Latrell Sprewell and Allan Houston, or even Keith Van Horn and Stephon Marbury. Talent-wise, the Celtics are at the bottom of the division, which is likely where they will finish this year. After Walker, Pierce, and a washed-out Kenny Anderson, Boston brings in Vitaly Potapenko as a depressing option up front, aging players in Brown and Carr who will likely not contribute a great deal, and big-time underachievers in Eric Williams and Tony Battie. The biggest thing they did this off-season was to bring in Bryant Stith, who hasn't averaged more than seven points a game in four seasons.
The surprise in all this is that, with such a dismal roster, the Celtics were not under the cap enough to attract one of the big name free agents out there this past off-season. They sent Danny Fortson and DanaBarros packing and received Pack (later traded for Stith), cash and a first-round draft pick, signed Brown, and drafted relative-unknown Jerome Moiso of UCLA. All of these moves, of course, are bound to have no impact on the standings, but then again, the last move in Boston that did so was Bird's retirement.
But to give credit where credit is due, Pitino did helm a 21-game turnaround in his first season as coach, with the additions of Anderson and Ron Mercer to the roster. He peaked early, though, and he has not finished closer than ten games under .500 in his three years in Boston (and he has only had one winning season in six years in the NBA). The question remains, what is he going to do about it? Even the guru of a college coaching world, where a freshman nobody can turn into a senior star, must realize that the NBA works in incredibly different ways. The only hope for resurrecting the Celtics is a huge free-agent signing, or a draft pick that turns out to be the second coming of Tim Duncan.
And Pitino, better than anybody, should understand this. After all, he is the guy who has openly alluded to the fact that he would not have accepted the Celtics job were he to know that the team wouldn't have drafted Tim Duncan. The Celtics were 15-67 in 1996-97, giving them the biggest chance at the number-one pick, which was enough to get Pitino to bolt Lexington for his second stint in the NBA. One year earlier, he had declined an offer from the deadbeat New Jersey Nets, an offer from a franchise he thought was going nowhere. But Tim Duncan was another story. Celtics fans would not be calling for Pitino's head nowadays were their team to have drafted Duncan, and he knew it. If the coach can soon bring in a player who will have similar impact, which remains to be seen, he may be able to salvage his tainted reputation in Boston and put the city back on the basketball map.
The Celtics organization understands that the coming season or two is essentially shot, especially with the transaction frenzy among the better Atlantic division teams, but the key to the Fortson trade was apparently a large amount of cash and the Jazz' first-round pick in the 2001 draft. General manager Chris Wallace insists that the team will have enough room under the cap and good enough draft prospects next year to start rebuilding.
But the Celtics have been rebuilding for the last seven years, a process that began with the Bird's retirement. Now, rumors have Bird interested in buying the team, which would be the best news Celtics fans have received in a decade. He could use his god-like status in the NBA to attract bigger names, and to start a rebuilding process that actually comes to fruition.
