FCP Roundtable #1: Preseason Prognostications

As the Celtics’ preseason got underway we asked three of our FCP contributors to sit down and answer some of the pressing questions facing the club. The early ticket sales for the Rajon Rondo Bandwagon and the surprising trade for Luke Jackson have created a new set of unknowns for the Celtics in few short days, but the team’s fundamental building blocks have not changed. Let’s take a look at where things stand at the front end of the preseason.

Q: The Celtics’ much rumored Iverson deal around draft day fell apart. In some quarters it was reported that there were discussions of a multiteam deal involving Wally Szczerbiak, Gerald Green and the #7 pick, but that those discussions fell apart due to a demand to include Al Jefferson (among other rumors). If this report was accurate, would you have made the deal and sent Jefferson on his way?

Mark: I would have pulled the trigger on the deal. I have serious concerns about the long-term health of Al Jefferson’s ankle. He is way too young (21) to have a string of injuries to the ankle area. In my mind, the real potential damage to the Celtics would have been in giving up Gerald Green after one year of his career. Iverson is not a “pure” point guard, but he is a singular, dynamic player. Iverson has led teams deep into the post season surrounded by players that while they have ability are second or third tier players in the NBA. His ability to run, slash and penetrate through traffic with the ball could have been huge for the Celtics.

Mike: I don’t think so. I’m probably going against the grain on this one but I don’t think the team should be trading away a ton of chips for Allen Iverson even if it doesn’t involve a young big man with scoring potential. Iverson has always been a spectacular talent and a true competitor in the purest sense of the word, but from where I am sitting it looks impossible to build a team around him. If you play him at point guard he dominates the ball and destroys any continuity your team could hope to have on offense. If he plays shooting guard, his natural position, you also need to pick up a PG like Kirk Hinrich who can defend bigger shooting guards on other teams. Those guys are hard to find, and certainly aren’t already on the Celtics’ roster. No matter who he defends Iverson is a liability on defense and only getting worse as he ages. I’m not going to pretend that I understand the dynamics of an NBA locker room but I have to assume his practice example and leadership style would be just as likely to hurt the young guys on the team as help them.

But with all that said I am such a homer that I’d be cheering wildly for him as soon as he pulls on a Celtics uniform. Mike Gorman may gush a little too much about him for my taste, but he’s right when he says that the guy is a special player.

Steve: It will be difficult for me to detach the fan side of me on this question, since Allen Iverson is my favorite player to watch in the league and I’m sure that I’d be spending half my winter at the Garden if he were on the C’s. It’s so difficult to get over the hump in the NBA that we might as well see the most exciting player in the league for a few years, right? I could offer a testimony to Iverson’s basketball heart that would make Peter Gammons’ tribute to Andre Dawson when he signed with the Red Sox seem like a scathing attack.

Of course, Danny Ainge can’t and shouldn’t think that way. The team has been weak for a long time at the four and the five position and they just have no short term or long term answers in place if they ship Al Jefferson out of town. That doesn’t mean Jefferson will be a world beater; year two was a sobering experience on the Big Al bandwagon. The only accurate description of his 05-06 defensive play is brutal. He seems like the nicest kid in the world, but toughness is a vital character trait in the NBA paint. The correct action is to be patient and give him time to develop, and all of us were probably guilty of thinking it would come immediately after his excellent (especially offensively) rookie campaign.

Paul Pierce loves Allen Iverson, and would probably buy a red carpet on the way to Logan to pick him up, but there would be a clear duplication of isolation on the offensive end. They might have fun, and they’d probably win several more games than they did last year, but ultimately the team would have the same issues that they had when Ricky Davis was alpha dog II as they would with Iverson and Pierce. It isn’t going to happen.

Q: Which player has the most to gain from a good preseason?

Steve: I think that Sebastian Telfair has the most to gain from a strong preseason. The minutes are going to be there at the point guard position if he can distribute the ball and play solid defense. Rondo is an unknown quantity in that he’ll have to prove that he’s not a complete offensive liability in order to play meaningful minutes in the NBA, and with Doc at the helm that is probably going to be a very tall order. Telfair is a veteran, and if he can get other people involved in the offense (a strangely tall order on this team that always seems to revert to isolating Pierce at the sign of any adversity), he’s going to get a healthy chunk of Delonte West’s point time.

Mike: Gerald Green closed last season with some eye-opening play, but he may be the victim of a numbers game this year. Doc and Danny keep claiming that the team will have a shorter rotation from game to game this year despite the claims that the team has a great deal of young talent. It seems like Perkins, Jefferson, Gomes and Ratliff will get the inside minutes, and Pierce, Telfair, West and Wally are locks on the wing. Which leaves one wing slot to get true rotation minutes. Tony Allen is a question mark after last year and Rondo is still a rookie, so a big preseason from Green could get him into a three man rotation with PP and Wally at the SG/SF slots. Of course, part of the good showing would be for Green to show he won’t get lost on defense as often as he did last year, as Pierce and Sczczerbiak will not be winning any awards for defensive intensity anytime soon. If Green shows that his learning curve has continued its sharp climb then he may got a shot at learning on the job when the games actually matter.

Mark: I am thinking Kendrick Perkins has the most to gain from a solid preseason campaign. We all assume that Perk will start for this team, but I think that a good preseason (which would consist of less fouls and more offensive production) could solidify his position, increase his projected minutes, and move Ratliff a little further down the bench. I make no bones about it, I am a huge Perkins fan and have been from the get go. I think he needs a good preseason to show the coaching staff that he is the man in the middle.

Q: Doc Rivers: get him gone or the right guy for the job?

Mark: I am a Doc Rivers fan, and admitting you have a problem is Step 1… I believe. I know that Doc is probably one of the weaker X and Os coaches around, but he has Tony Brown who is a fantastic basketball tactician. Doc’s strength is in the personnel management, for lack of a better term. I think he’s done a really good job at getting solid contributions out of young players. I know his detractors will point to Marcus Banks, but I think you could make a pretty good case right now, in this town, that for all his physical abilities Banks is not a top tier NBA player. Now, the ultimate concern is whether these young players (Perk, Jefferson, West, Gomes, and especially Tony Allen) can take the next step in their careers from promising young players to solid NBA contributors. I don’t think any of these guys has to become a star like Pierce, but they all need to be more productive this season or Doc Rivers could be on a slippery slope with ownership.

Steve: The easy answer is to say “get him gone,” since even the best and most successful NBA coaches eventually seem to get fired or pushed out. I do think that this is one of the more difficult rosters to work with in the NBA. Besides the youth, almost everyone in the regular rotation is a “.5” player. You have a 1.5 (Delonte), a bunch of 2.5’s (Pierce, Green, Wally), a 3.5 (Gomes), and a couple of 4.5’s (Jefferson, Perkins). Ainge’s draft strategy has been to take the best player available, and in most cases he’s done quite well for himself. I don’t think however that this is the easiest team to manage, and the overall weakness on the defensive end probably has limited in the past how many answers Doc has when the opponent has a mobile big man or point guard. Hopefully the addition of Ratliff and Rondo will help this weakness, along with having a healthy Tony Allen all year. Doc stays the year, but I don’t think he will survive when the win total ends up in the thirties.

Mike: I certainly don’t think Doc is at the top of his profession. He seems incapable of managing his team’s rotations, to the point where it seems like every other game finds the Celtics with 5 subs getting run off the floor by an opponent playing 2 or 3 starters. Similarly it is rare to see the Celtics play a solid game two games in a row. Most people would lay that at the feet of the youth movement, but the coach has some say in that too.

Even so, when you look around the league I think half the teams could say the exact same things, or worse. Doc may be a younger and better spoken basketball version of the “good baseball man” that keeps getting managerial jobs even though his teams suck, but he has done some positive things during his tenure that have seemed to slip under the radar. For example, after years of being given carte blanche under the Jim O’Brien system, Paul Pierce openly challenged Doc during his first season with the club. Doc used a firm hand with PP a couple of times in public, and since then has worked behind the scenes to communicate with his star. Obviously Pierce himself deserves the lion’s share of credit for his transformation over the course of last year, but Doc did a lot to foster that growth. I’m ok with seeing him stay on a little longer, in the hopes that the young players mature in time to take advantage of the continuity keeping him would provide.

Q: Does Leon Powe make any contribution this year besides spotting Brian Scalabrine on the bench press?

Mike: I would be surprised if Powe didn’t get some minutes somewhere along the line with the injury history that the Cs big men have. Watching him in college you could see he had an NBA body and could hold his own in any wrestling match under the glass. The question will be whether he can be resourceful enough on offense to overcome his lack of size and questionable jump shot. It seems foolish for a team to play one sub-6’8” power forward, much less two. But I’m not counting this guy out.

Steve: Powe is a great kid and I’m rooting hard for him to be successful. It’s unlikely he’ll make a statistically significant contribution as Gomes did in ‘05-’06 (he may not even make the final roster), but I see him grabbing some key early fourth quarter rebounds before the season is out. Betting on hard work and maturity in the NBA is usually a sound prospect.

Mark: Leon Powe will probably see a lot of minutes, in the NBADL. Which is where he belongs right now. It’s a numbers game, and the math probably doesn’t add up for him until someone gets injured.

Q: How will the PG minutes be shared at the start of the season?

Steve: I think that it will break down 20 (West), 20 (Telfair), and 8 (Rondo) in your average early season game, with West also getting 10 or so minutes at the 2. Telfair is going to have to play well to keep and increase this workload.

Mark: I am looking at Telfair as the starter, and I think he will probably get somewhere in the realm of 30 minutes per game, like Delonte West did last season. But, given Rondo’s nice play in the preseason thus far, that could change. I expect that Telfair will step up his game accordingly and remain the projected starter.

Mike: Telfair will be the starter because the Cs have put too much of an investment into him not to. Also I think Delonte West is a player who will accept coming of the bench for the good of the team better than Telfair will after his trying experience tumbling down Portland’s depth chart last season. I personally would like to see West get more time at the shooting guard and play alongside both Telfair and Rondo, and it appears that Rondo’s play early on has the team leaning in this direction. However, if Doc really does want to keep the rotation short, I could see Rondo being broken in slowly with West getting more minutes at PG.

Q: What do you think the ceiling for this team is, as presently constituted?

Mark: I have been projecting this team in the 40-44 win range, and I think that will get them a nice seed in the postseason. More importantly, I think that this team will be able to win by playing a lot of young guys in their rotation. This team needs to win this year, but I don’t see them winning the whole thing this year.

Mike: I think 45 wins and a division title is not outside the realm of possibility. As with most of the past few years, you look around at the Eastern Conference and no one is really jumping out at you as a complete team. New Jersey is not running away with the division this year with Cliff Robinson and Jason Collins logging big minutes inside, no matter how much mileage Uncle Cliff gets from his mysterious anti-aging medication. That kind of season would be a rousing success, and yet if the team is a few games above .500 at the all-star break and has a bad west coast trip I would not be the least bit surprised to see a housecleaning, even though a 45 win season is within their grasp. It’s an interesting tightrope to walk.

Steve: I’m not as bullish as Mike. I think that they still have too many questions inside and too much talent at the same position. Even if Jefferson, Ratliff and Perkins stay healthy (which frankly would be a miracle), they’re going to need defensive production out of Jefferson and offensive production out of Perkins. I think that a .500 season would meet the top of my expectations, but I’m expecting a 33-35 win season.

Q: You have the extreme good fortune of being Gary Tanguay for a day. Sow the seeds of doubt by undermining a perceived strength of the team with a “just throwing it out there.” Bonus points for being obviously incorrect.

Mike: Kendrick Perkins. The team just committed over $16 million dollars to the guy, and we have no idea if he can play a full season. He has had a handful of good games, mostly against soft centers like Sam Dalembert of the Sixers, and now he has a recurring shoulder problem that could cause him to shy away from contact. I’m just throwing it out there, but I think we could see him start to shy away from contact to protect himself now that he’s got a long term deal.

Steve: Despite the universal presumption that Doc and Pierce got along last year, my best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with a girl who heard Pierce call Doc a “chode” at Mistral last night. I guess he sounded pretty serious.

Mark: I’m Gary Tanguay?? My first question is: Why am I always so orange on TV? The home of the Celtics can’t afford a makeup artist??

I do not believe that Paul Pierce wants to be here any longer. Why would he? So he can help more young players develop? Pierce has his money, now he wants his ring(s).