I had my ticket. My bags were packed. The conductor was calling. But I just couldn't seem to commit to getting on the Celtics Bandwagon. I was all set to declare them legally dead, what with the Kevorkian-like move of bringing Antoine Walker back. Just one patented 'Toine "shuffle" and we could pound the last nail into the big green coffin that had been clinging to life support for the last few seasons. But I think we may just have a pulse.
Deep down, despite how much I may love the Red Sox, at my core I'm a Celts fan. While most kids collected baseball cards, I have boxes and boxes at home of Fleer and Topps basketball cards I've collected over the years. One box is devoted completely to the Celtics. My dad and I watched Celts games together all the time, listening to stories from him about the good old days. 33-32-00 was the Holy Trinity for me long before ESPN started using it in their ad campaign. In middle school while most kids idolized Jordan, my best friend and I lauded Bird and Havlicek. Today I think I'm one of the last six or seven fans who still care what happens to The Team That Red Built. That's why these last few years have been so agonizing.
Supposedly being Irish and being lucky go hand-in-hand. Apparently somebody forgot to tell Danny Ainge. That, or whatever luck the team may once have had disappeared with the destruction of the Garden and the absence of Red Auerbach's magic touch. The Curse of the Bambino may be over (if it ever even existed) but another curse continues in Boston - The Curse of Len Bias. For those of you who don't know who he was, Len Bias was Maryland's star forward and the Celtics' first round pick in the 1986 draft. This is one of the all-time "What If?" for Celtics fans. He had the potential to be one of the greats, and there's no telling how many more championships the Green Machine could have won with his help. But no one ever got to find out, because Bias died of a drug overdose less than 48 hours after being selected by Boston. It's all been downhill from that point on for the Celts. Since then the team has been plagued by one bad move or one bad stroke of fortune after the other. The death of Reggie Lewis in 1999; the disaster that was Rick Pitino; the loss of Tim Duncan in the 1997 draft; and now we're under the reign of Danny Ainge, whose made worse decisions than Ron Burgandy choosing milk.
There was a brief shining moment, what looked like the true revival of the Celtic Dynasty, during the Jim O'Brien period, but Danny nipped that in the bud pretty quickly. Ainge inherited a team that in 2002 made it to the Eastern Conference finals and was two or three moves away from becoming a true contender for a 17th title. Instead, he dismantled the team and drove O'Brien out of town to rival Philadelphia. He gave away almost every piece of the 2002 team, culminating in his trade of co-captain Antoine Walker for Raef LaFrentz. By the time Walter McCarty left for Phoenix, Paul Pierce and Mark Blount were the last remnants of the team that only two years earlier almost made it into the NBA Finals. And now it comes full circle with the return of Number 8 less than 18 months since his dismissal. But maybe this was all part of Ainge's master plan. Trade away Walker, show him the team isn't going to put up with his antics, and bring back a guy more than ready to prove his worth. But has he really changed in only a year and a half?
The biggest gripe about Walker (besides his dancing, his poor shot selection, his shaky ball handling skills and his inability to get into rebounding position) were the insane amount of three-pointers he took every game. Career, he's attempted 3,321 shots from downtown, and has sunk 1,080. He's changing his ways though. During the 2001-2002 season he started 81 games for the Celtics, played a total of 3,406 minutes and was 222-645 in 3PM-A. In his 2003-2004 season for Dallas he started in 82 games and was 82-305 from behind the mark, although playing only 2,840 minutes. He's also bringing an average of 20.6 points and 9.50 rebounds a game with him. And his biggest contribution will be removing the weight of leadership off Pierce's back, a responsibility Pierce clearly could not handle. The team is 4-0 since Walker's return, and it doesn't look like a flash in the pan.
As mediocre as this team has been for a long while, things are looking up. They're starting to remind me of the Red Sox. Everyone was writing off Terry Francona when he was named manager, then the team bottomed out for most of the summer, barely playing .500 ball, and then we traded away Nomar. The Celts are a lot like this. We hire Doc Rivers, who was coming off a miserable season in Orlando, we hover around .500 until the All-Star break, and now we do the inverse of the Nomar trade by trading for an old fixture of the team to help rejuvenate it. We're 31-28, first in the Atlantic, and improbably The Glove, Gary Payton, has resigned with the team, claiming he wants to continue working with the "kids," like Al Jefferson, Delonte West and Marcus Banks, who are proving to be fantastic players.
Things are changing for this team. I actually saw Pierce smile. I saw a player scramble for a loose ball that would have made Larry Bird proud. And, most incredible of all, Number 8 is back on the parquet floor wiggling up and down the court with the team he calls home. Let's hold off sending flowers to the funeral home just yet, cause this team has found its second wind.
Andrew Bauld is a sophomore majoring in history. He can be reached at Andrew.Bauld@tufts.edu.
