A New Beginning
By Mike
With the start of another season comes another new beginning for the Boston Celtics.
Twenty years ago this fall Boston’s storied basketball franchise was hanging its 16th NBA championship banner. The club that brought the championship home to Boston was one of the greatest ever, its long list of stars all proud of their willingness to subordinate their own glory to the team’s success. Since then the team’s achievements have been limited to a few shining moments in the earlier rounds of the playoffs. With each passing season the team’s shrinking fandom grows more restless as the memories of past glory grow more faint.
This particular edition of the Celtics looks much like the last few. Executive Director of Basketball Operations Danny Ainge has earned every letter of that excessively lengthy title with a lot of roster churn over his four years overseeing the club. As with the prior models, the 2006-07 Celtics enter the season with a team full of youth surrounding Paul Pierce and a few other veterans at different locations on the spectrum of usefulness. However, unlike last year, there are fault lines running through the club in particular and the league as a whole that appear certain to take this team a long way from where it stands today by this time next year.
The current roster has been sculpted according to Ainge’s personnel strengths (the middle and lower ranges of the draft) and weaknesses (free agent signings). There is an unusually large number of players approaching the expiration of their rookie deals in the next two years, and as was seen with Marcus Banks last year the team will have to make a decision on each sooner or later. Overlaying this evaluation effort is the urgency imposed by the status of the Celtics’ resident superstar, Paul Pierce. During the summer Pierce received a three-year contract extension on par with the elite players in the league, which probably should have been accompanied by the installation of a giant hourglass at the end of the Celtics’ bench. With each Pierce paycheck comes a clearer realization that every day the team does not contend for an NBA title is another day closer to the end of Pierce’s prime.
The uncertain nature of the roster around Pierce is now mirrored for the first time in a few years by an equally uncertain outlook for the team’s coaching staff and management. Ainge can no longer be said to be building the team from scratch; the roster is his handiwork at this point, for better or for worse. His chosen coach to lead this young team to respectability, Doc Rivers, is entering his third year, which is notable because both Ainge and Rivers have talked in the past about a “shelf life” of three seasons for a coach. By the end of three seasons of a coach’s regime either the team is keyed in to what the coach wants or else the players have begun to shut him out. At this point it’s hard to imagine both Rivers and Ainge keeping their jobs if the team ends up in the draft lottery again.
All of this could be said to be the usual outlook of a team developing (some would say groping around for) a winning foundation, but the league backdrop adds another dimension to the uncertainty.
In recent years there had been little question of how to build a winner in the NBA: acquire two marquee stars by hook or by crook and then fill in around them with veterans who know how to play a physical brand of defense and win close games. The Pistons’ championship in 2004 had been a departure from that formula, but the unique defensive skills and clutch play of that Detroit team did not really cause a rash of copycats around the league.
During the early rounds of last year’s playoffs the NBA pundits noted that the recent rule changes and officiating directives had created a new flavor of basketball, where dribble penetration was highly valued, overly physical defense was penalized, and teams began playing a more wide open pace. The success of the Suns and the Mavericks, and to a lesser extent the Clippers and the Bulls, illustrated this new formula for victory. Until the fourth quarter of Game 3 of the Finals, at least, a new day had dawned in the NBA.
However, just when it seemed that the new-look Mavericks would usher in the new era for the league the Miami Heat outlasted the Mavericks in the Finals and took home the title. Miami was a team constructed around the special talents of Shaquille O’Neal and Dwyane Wade and the canny experience supplied by a host of veterans. In the classic reactive mode of sportswriters everywhere, the same people who had been blowing trumpets to mark the league’s sea change started talking about teams needing to find that second superstar to take them over the top just like in years past.
After the keyboards cooled off for a few weeks after the Finals the Celtics seemed to join in the chorus of Heat worshippers by making a well-publicized bid for Allen Iverson. Iverson of course is a marquee player who could fill the superstar role next to Pierce, and the rumors of the deal sent copy editors scurrying to brainstorm headlines employing new combinations of “The Truth” and “The Answer.” However, when the Iverson deal fell through, Ainge kept his trading hat on and acquired Sebastian Telfair, Theo Ratliff and Rajon Rondo as part of multiple draft day deals. No superstars in that group, but the pickups brought with them ballhandling and interior defense that had been sorely lacking from last year’s team.
So here the Celtics sit, having assembled a team which on paper boasts the ballhandling and shooting skills to excel in the “new” style of game, but having made clear their desire to acquire a superstar to pair with Pierce under the O’Neal-Wade (or less successful Pierce-Walker) model. The early quotes out of camp describe an added emphasis on up tempo offense to get easier shots in the open floor for the Celtics young talented players and older shooters as well. But even with this apparent effort to form an identity with the assets they currently have, you never know when Trader Danny may pull the trigger on a three-for-one deal that casts the team’s lot in a new direction. If you’re a fan like me, it’s going to be fun to watch this develop.
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Much like the new beginning for the Celtics, this post marks a new beginning for the BSMW Full Court Press. Jon Duke, who had ably captained this page in past seasons, has moved on to become a regular contributor to the Celticsstufflive podcasts, which are highly recommended to anyone looking for a unique take on the Celtics and some great guests. We’ll miss Jon, but we are still hoping we can lure him back to give us his thoughts on the team as the season gets underway.
In the meantime, like any baseball team who loses a superstar closer and can’t replace his production, the FCP will be going with a bullpen-by-committee approach to try to make up for Jon’s departure. (Hopefully that will be the last baseball analogy you see in here for a while, unless Dr. Charles is interested in putting us on the payroll.) We have assembled a solid group of contributors from around the country who all have different viewpoints on the team’s positioning but a common interest in pulling for the next championship for Boston’s most successful franchise. As the season progresses we will be trying some new approaches to our column format, but we’ll also be unabashed about “borrowing” the highly successful roundtable format from the boys over at BSMW’s Game Day Rear View. Our inaugural roundtable will be posted tomorrow, and we hope you’ll check back then and often for more thoughts on the Celtics and the NBA in general.
