Tagged: Kendrick Perkins
Kyrie Irving Trade Makes Celtics Undeniably Different
I did not write about the Isaiah Thomas/Kyrie Irving trade the night the story first broke because I felt too close to it as a fan of Isaiah Thomas. In two and a half seasons, he became the most universally popular Celtics player among casual Boston sports fans–more so than Paul Pierce–since Larry Bird. Personally, I wrote about Isaiah in his relatively brief tenure almost as much as I have about David Ortiz, Tom Brady, and Patrice Bergeron, three titans of the City of Champions era that Boston has been enjoying since February of 2002.
I did not write about the Isaiah Thomas/Kyrie Irving trade in the week that followed, as the teams first acknowledged the trade on their various social media profiles, but then the trade did not get finalized right away. The Cleveland Cavaliers were skeptical of the integrity of Isaiah Thomas’ injured hip (a concern that admittedly did not get talked about enough once the Celtics’ season ended) and asked for more assets to complete the trade. It was not a one-for-one swap of two star point guards to begin with: the Celtics also gave up Jae Crowder, Ante Žižić, and the Brooklyn Nets’ 2018 1st round draft pick, the last unrealized asset from the Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett trade to the Nets in 2013. To complete the deal with Cleveland’s concerns about Thomas’ hip, the Celtics also had to add a 2020 2nd round pick from the Miami Heat.
I did not write about the Isaiah Thomas/Kyrie Irving trade after the trade was finalized, and after the Celtics held their introductory press conference with Irving and free agent signing Gordon Hayward. While I understood that it was a huge trade, and objectively a good trade that will help the Celtics in the long run, I was not sure I could bring anything else to the table that had not already been said in the week between when the trade reported and when it became official. That said, I do have quite a few thoughts on the matter, and I have been writing about the Celtics in this space since the days of Pierce, Garnett, Doc Rivers, and Rajon Rondo, and if I never write about it, then why am I writing about basketball at all?
Bill Simmons pointed out on various podcasts that trades like this hardly ever happen. Two conference rivals, the two Eastern Conference finalists from 2017 just swapped point guards. The last time contenders of this caliber traded players of this caliber within the same conference was in 1980 when the Phoenix Suns dealt Paul Westphal to the Seattle SuperSonics for Dennis Johnson. But with the looming threat of LeBron James’ free agency next summer, these were desperate times for Cleveland. And with the looming threat of having to sign a guy under six feet in his late 20s with an injury history to a maximum contract, Boston was acting from a point of desperation in its own right.
I wrote in the spring about my worry that Isaiah would get the Malcolm Butler treatment from the Celtics, and in September, Butler is (for now) still a member of the Patriots, and Isaiah has been dealt. My worry was the Boston Sports Media would use any success in the Eastern Conference Finals after Isaiah went down with his hip injury to take him for granted and put the ball in motion towards running him out of town. I was admittedly emotionally attached to Isaiah, but I really did think he could be one of the three stars on a championship team. I did not think the Celtics would be able to get anything in return comparable to Isaiah, considering the asking prices at the deadline for Paul George and Jimmy Butler, and later, given the returns Indiana and Chicago got for George and Butler when they traded them during the summer. Of course, I thought all of that before I knew Kyrie Irving would be available.
In Irving, the Celtics landed another dynamic point guard who can score at will, but while both are injury-prone, Kyrie is taller and younger. Some have argued that the Celtics were not able to land a player who has proven he can be the best player on a championship team, but the only players who fit that description are LeBon, Kevin Durant, Steph Curry and Kawhi Leonard that are still in their prime (sorry, Dwyane Wade and Dirk Nowitzki), but Kyrie is the next best thing. He performed well in the Finals against Golden State, and even though he already has a ring, seems eager and poised to win outside of LeBron’s shadow.
The Celtics turned over their roster a lot for a team that was just in the Eastern Conference Finals. For some context, the Celtics had six players from the very bad 2006-07 team (Pierce, Rondo, Kendrick Perkins, Brian Scalabrine, Leon Powe, and Tony Allen) that contributed to the 2007-08 championship team, while they now only have four players (Al Horford, Marcus Smart, Terry Rozier, and Jaylen Brown) left from three months ago. For even more context, the Bruins currently have six players (Bergeron, Zdeno Chara, David Krejci, Brad Marchand, Adam McQuaid, and Tuukka Rask) left form their 2011 Stanley Cup team, and they won the Bruins won the Cup six years ago! Danny Ainge knew the Celtics were still far off from where they wanted to be, and he made the moves he needed to make if they wanted to move forward. Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward might not be enough to get past the Warriors, but they have certainly narrowed the gap between them and Cleveland, with Cleveland’s future in jeopardy beyond 2018.
It’s really incredible how quickly Danny Ainge rebuilt the Celtics going out with a whimper against the New York Knicks in 2013. They only went into the lottery once with their own pick, made the two biggest free agent signings in franchise history, and got good returns in trades for Pierce, Garnett, Rondo, and Thomas. While the post-Kobe Lakers continue to toil in the lottery, Ainge reminded everyone that he is one of the best GMs in the game. A decade after bringing Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett to Boston, the Celtics have reloaded once again. He made a move I could not have made (and that’s one of a hundred reasons I don’t run the Celtics), and improved the team’s championship odds, and expanded their championship window.
While I have my doubts about how quickly the Celtics will come together early in the season–I would not be surprised if they go through early struggles like the 2010-11 Miami Heat–the long-term future of the team is much brighter and clearer than it was even six months ago. From a local perspective, the NBA season got a lot more interesting.
Time to Do Something
The other day, I got one of those notifications from Facebook that it was the two year anniversary of something I had posted, and asking if I wanted to re-share it for the sake of nostalgia. Now normally, these notifications are from much longer ago than 2014. By that point in my life, I had been over Facebook for a while. I’ve been on the social network since I was a high school senior in 2008, and posted a lot more things in the first couple years than I have since. By 2014, I was 24 years old. By December, I had just wrapped up my first semester back in college after a year and a half off (And my undergraduate journey at Fitchburg State University, that started when I transferred there from UMass Dartmouth in 2009, finally came to an end with graduation last week. Took me long enough!), and I even had the same smartphone I currently use at that stage in the game. I was working second shift at the time, and therefore did not have much of a social life, and it was a good six months before the year-and-a-half where seemingly all of my friends started getting married, so what could it have possibly been?
Oh, that’s right. I realized as soon as I clicked on it. Of course it was just me posting an article from this very blog for my Facebook friends to read. It was this week two years ago that the Boston Celtics traded Rajon Rondo, at the time the team’s captain and starting point guard and the last remaining player from the 2008 NBA Championship Celtics squad, to the Dallas Mavericks. Of the players Boston got in return, Jameer Nelson and Brandan Wright were not long for the team, but Jae Crowder has carved out an important role for himself on the Celtics as they have made the playoffs both years since the trade.
In the article, I shamelessly piggybacked onto a take from Bill Simmons, a bad habit I continue to do to this day, including in this post, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The big thing I got wrong, looking back on my post reacting to the Rondo Trade is how badly I missed on how Rondo would fit in Dallas, but I take solace in the fact that I was hardly the only one. If Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and general manager Donnie Nelson, who are not idiots and who have one of the better run franchises in the NBA, knew how badly Rondo would fit, they never would have pulled the trigger on the trade. After getting bounced by the in-state rival Houston Rockets, Rondo signed a one-year deal with the Sacramento Kings in the summer of 2015, and a one-year deal with the Chicago Bulls in the summer of 2016, joining forces with former nemesis Dwyane Wade in what has to be one of the most awkward locker room dynamics the NBA has seen that does not, to my knowledge, involve a player having an affair with a teammate’s wife or mother.
While I thought adding Rondo, one of the great playmaking point guards of his generation, to what was already a very efficient offense built around Dirk Nowitzki, Monta Ellis, and Tyson Chandler (Who has never been able to find a more perfect basketball situation than the one he had playing for Rick Carlisle and alongside Dirk. I know Phoenix offered him a lot of money in the summer of 2015, but he should have learned from leaving Dallas the first time that there is no greener pasture for him. If Chandler played his whole career as Dirk’s center, he’d be a no-brainer for the Hall of Fame, if you ask me.), but Rondo’s need to have the ball in his hands to make things happen coupled with his poor shooting, fear of driving to the basket due to his even graver fear of taking foul shots was too many moving parts, and things went off the rails in Dallas.
On the other hand, my frustration with Rondo when he was with the Celtics is well documented, and my feelings on this aspect of Rondo’s game made me want the C’s to trade him away two years before it actually happened, so I may have been wrong initially about how Rondo would fit in Dallas, but I also feel like it validated many of the things I had been saying about the player at parties for years, going back to when the Celtics were title contenders…which brings me to the real reason I am writing about all of this today.
The Boston Celtics have been in some sort of rebuild mode, whether they were ready to admit it or not, since time expired in Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals at Staples Center, when the Los Angeles Lakers were handed their second Larry O’Brien Trophy in a three year span, instead of the Celtics. Before the end of the month, the Celtics would draft Avery Bradley, and were prepared to let Tony Allen walk in free agency when he was well on his way to becoming the NBA’s best defensive guard.
In July of that year, Allen signed with the Memphis Grizzlies, but the far bigger story was The Decision. With LeBron James and Chris Bosh joining forces with Dwyane Wade and taking their talents to South Beach, the landscape of the Eastern Conference was drastically altered, and while the Celtics remained competitive for a few more years, their championship window was effectively shut, as no LeBron-less team has come out of the East since the 2010 Celtics.
I do not know for sure, as I have never talked to him and cannot pretend to read his mind, but I think Celtics GM Danny Ainge realized just how futile resistance to the powerhouse Heat would be in the long term when he traded starting center and fan favorite Kendrick Perkins to the Oklahoma City Thunder, with the primary return in the trade being Jeff Green, at the trade deadline in 2011. The move cost the Celtics a legitimate chance at going back to the Finals that year, as their big man hopes without Perk were hinged entirely on the health of a 39 year old Shaquille O’Neal, who would retire from basketball that summer, but Ainge was already in the process of turning the roster into more desirable assets, as the New Big Three could not sustain the Celtics in the 2010s.
Ray Allen would join LeBron and the Miami Heat in the summer of 2012. In 2012-13, the Ray Allen-less Celtics stumbled out of the gate, and my frustration with Rajon Rondo was at an all time high, but after Rondo got injured, Garnett and Pierce rallied together and turned out another playoff berth. It wasn’t enough, though, and the Celtics were eliminated in the first round by the New York Knicks, and my first real blog post in this space was acknowledging the end of the Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce Era in Boston in the spring of 2013. In the summer of 2013, the Celtics made big changes, trading Garnett and Pierce to the Brooklyn Nets for some forgettable players and a boatload of first round draft picks, that have so far turned into James Young and Jaylen Brown, and the Celtics still own the right to swap picks with Brooklyn in 2017 and have Brooklyn’s first round pick in 2018 on top of that. They also traded head coach Doc Rivers to the Los Angeles Clippers, and hired Brad Stevens away from Butler University to oversee the development of the future of Celtics basketball. A year and a half later, the Celtics traded Rondo to Dallas, and I thought it meant the rebuild was in full swing. Two years later, it still feels like the Celtics are still stuck in the middle with no obvious way out.
All of this has happened before, and Celtics fans have been lulled into patience. Danny Ainge was hired in 2003, and tore down what had been a perennial playoff team but hardly a title contender when he traded away Antoine Walker, and spent years collecting assets before making two big splashes in the summer of 2007, when he acquired Ray Allen from Seattle and Kevin Garnett from Minnesota. If it feels like things are taking longer than it did the last time, it’s because it is. Trader Danny’s reputation around the NBA now is such that teams are more wary of making a deal with him than they were nearly a decade ago. Generally, NBA front offices have gotten smarter since 2007, and while the Celtics are still regarded as one of the “smart teams,” that is a much larger group than it used to be.
Look at the big trades Ainge has made. Former Celtics Assistant GM (and son of legendary Boston Globe sportswriter Will McDonough) Ryan McDonough has to be on the hot seat in Phoenix given the way the franchise has struggled since he basically gave Isaiah Thomas away to the Celtics in 2015. Former Brooklyn Nets GM Billy King has “former” attached to his name largely because of how badly the Garnett/Pierce trade set the Nets back on what was a long-shot short-term championship gamble at best.
There is no friend and former Celtics teammate like Kevin McHale being strong-armed by his team’s ownership to trade their franchise superstar and rebuild the way McHale was in 2007. And before you say Larry Bird is running the Pacers and Paul George’s future in Indiana remains uncertain, Think about this: Larry Legend watched what McHale went through in the KG Trade Saga, ultimately having to choose between comparable but not great offers from the Celtics and Lakers, with Danny Ainge, the kid brother to the Original Big Three, now running the show in Boston, trying to think what Red Auerbach, the man who drafted Bird, McHale, and Ainge, and who had past away at the start of the 2006-07 season, would do or want him to do in that situation, and decided to show his loyalty to the team he played his entire Hall of Fame career for and trade KG to the Celtics instead of the Lakers. Since then, Bird saw McHale lose his job as GM of the Minnesota Timberwolves, do TV for a little while, coach the Houston Rockets for a few years before getting fired in 2015 because Dwight Howard and James Harden quit on him, and is now out of basketball. Do you really think Larry Bird, who has been running the Indiana Pacers virtually this entire century, would in a million years let himself fall into the same trap Kevin McHale did trading a franchise superstar to Danny Ainge and the Celtics, and when Paul George leads the C’s to a record 18th Title, have every talking head on ESPN and FS1, and every Internet commenter make the same joke about how the Celtics better give Larry Bird a ring the way they did with McHale in 2008? That’s never going to happen.
The most intriguing trade option out there is DeMarcus “Boogie” Cousins of the Sacramento Kings. Simmons wrote two parallel columns a couple weeks ago, one where the Celtics traded for Cousins and they were the perfect match for one another, and Boston becomes an NBA power just as Cleveland and Golden State slide into a decline, and another where it’s an unmitigated disaster, and Danny Ainge’s future is as a color commentator on TNT, and Brad Stevens replaces Coach K as the head coach at Duke. While the columns were entirely speculative, it sure feels like Cousins-to-the-Celtics could only go one of those two ways, with no in between.
Cousins is supremely talented, was a college star at Kentucky, was picked 5th overall by the Kings in the 2010 NBA Draft, but has been the victim of maybe the most comically incompetent basketball operations in the NBA, is prone to tantrums, clashing with coaches, teammates, and members of the media. It is hard to tell if he is a product of his environment or if his environment is the product of him, to borrow from Jack Nicholson in The Departed, but I tend to believe that it’s the former. The Kings were inept long before Boogie got there, and their revolving door of coaches, executives, and owners since he arrived would have made people think less of any star player. Not to say he’d have Boogie’s reputation, but if the first six years of Tim Duncan’s career were in that kind of chaos, Tim Duncan would not be the Tim Duncan we know.
If I were Danny Ainge, I would go for it. I think the unmitigated disaster option, while frightening, is a risk worth taking. At any rate, the Celtics are still not any closer to their next contending team than they were two years ago, and it is time to shake things up. The Celtics are a playoff team, but not a true contender. They have nice pieces, and good surrounding talent like Al Horford, Jae Crowder, and Isaiah Thomas. They have promising young talent in Jaylen Brown, who has impressed in his limited minutes, but they still do not have a superstar, and it’s nearly impossible to win in the NBA without a superstar. I realize it’s harder in 2016 to do what he was able to do in 2007, but I am getting tired of being in the middle. Something needs to be done.
What’s next for the NBA?
With the salary cap in the NBA jumping from $70 million to $94.1 million this summer, there was a real chance for the landscape of the league to dramatically change, and it did, but not in the way fans were hoping, unless they live in the Bay Area. After Kevin Durant’s Independence Day weekend in The Hamptons, in which Oklahoma City still thought they had a chance at keeping KD, and power brokers from Gregg Popovich to Pat Riley to Steve Ballmer to Steve Kerr and Jerry West to Danny Ainge and even Tom Brady got in on the action to try and lure him to their respective team and city, and ultimately Kevin Durant decided to take his talents to the record-breaking 73 regular season win Golden State Warriors.
To me, this doesn’t feel like when LeBron James made The Decision in 2010, to take his talents to South Beach, to join forces with Dwyne Wade and Chris Bosh, and to rip the collective heart out of a city that had not won a championship in any sport since the Johnson Administration. With Durant’s departure from OKC, he was leaving a better basketball situation than LeBron left in Cleveland, and chose a basketball situation that has even higher expectations, but also a better chance for success than Miami in year one was. In 2010, it was Wade and Pat Riley recruiting LeBron and Bosh to play for their team, circumventing the crap shoot that is building through the draft by putting together three of the top five picks from the 2003 NBA Draft as fully formed, fully developed NBA stars seven years later.
(It’s worth noting that this wasn’t the first time Riley was able to stockpile lottery picks from the same draft class. The 2006 Miami Heat team that beat Dallas in the NBA Finals was the only team to have the top three picks from the same draft: #1 pick Shaquille O’Neal, #2 pick Alonzo Mourning, and #3 pick Christian Laettner from the 1992 Draft, and none of them had been drafted by the Heat. In hockey, former Boston Bruins and current Edmonton Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli has now traded away the #1 and #2 picks from the 2010 NHL Draft, Taylor Hall and Tyler Seguin, both good players, and both dealt for pennies on the dollar, making Chiarelli two thirds of the way to completing the illusive “Reverse Pat Riley.”)
I have mixed feelings when it comes to the plight of the Oklahoma City Thunder and their fans. It has to be devastating to lose such a dynamic talent without getting anything in return. As a Celtics fan, the tease of KD when he was a star at Texas in a year that the C’s were in the lottery was tantalizing, and the devastation when the Celtics fell to #5 in the draft order was real. The Portland Trail Blazers even took Greg Oden from Ohio State with the first pick so either of the top two picks could have made KD a Celtic. Again the possibility of Durant coming to Boston had me and other Celtics fans excited for a couple days, especially after the Greatest Quarterback of All Time and the Greatest Designated Hitter of All Time joined the recruiting effort, but again it wasn’t to be. If Kevin Durant could toy with my emotions all these years without ever playing for my team or against my team in a playoff series, the pain Thunder fans has to be exponentially worse. That being said, the Thunder had to see this coming.
Thunder GM Sam Presti did an excellent job picking in the lottery when was in there three straight years. First, he took Durant in 2007, then Russell Westbrook in 2008, and James Harden in 2009. That is about as good as it gets for building a young and athletic foundation for a franchise (though they may have been bested by Minnesota in the last couple years. Time will tell). They made the NBA Finals in 2012, and were not as ready for the moment as the aforementioned LeBron/Wade/Bosh Miami team that had finally figured it out. Even still, the future looked bright for Oklahoma City, and then they panicked. Before the start of the 2012-13 season, Presti traded James Harden to the Houston Rockets for an assortment of assets. In the years that followed, Harden blossomed into an All-Star, a franchise player, and a piece of tabloid fodder, but nonetheless a perennial MVP candidate along with his fellow former OKC lottery picks. NBA teams can go decades without landing even one player like this and the Thunder had stumbled upon three, right out of college and learning to be professionals together.
While Presti deserves credit for drafting as well as he did, the Thunder have had shortcomings in other areas of their basketball operation. They have never run a particularly creative offense, relying heavily on the individual athletic prowess of Durant and Westbrook to win games. To be fair, that helped them win a lot of games, but in an incredibly tough Western Conference, good has not been good enough most of the time. The one two punch of KD and Russ presents a tough mismatch for most teams, but it has been effectively neutralized in big games by the incomparable ball movement of the San Antonio Spurs and the great passing combined with the historically great three point shooting of the Golden State Warriors. After a disappointing 2014-15 season when reigning MVP Durant was injured most of the season and Westbrook had his share of injuries, OKC missed the playoffs and decided to part ways with head coach Scott Brooks. This would have been a great opportunity to replace Brooks with a proven and creative NBA coach like offensive mastermind Alvin Gentry (who led the Phoenix Suns to the Western Conference Finals in 2010 and was an assistant on Steve Kerr’s staff in Golden State that year) or defensive innovator Tom Thibodeau (who basically invented the modern NBA defense and was suddenly available after the Chicago Bulls stupidly decided to move on from him, but instead they decided to go with a very successful college coach in Billy Donovan. Now Gentry is coaching Anthony Davis in New Orleans, and Thibodeau has Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins to coach in Minnesota while Donovan had to adapt to the NBA after nearly two decades at the University of Florida on the fly while also trying to win in the short term and keep Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook confident and content in Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma City is at a disadvantage compared to some other NBA cities. They cannot offer the lifestyle opportunities that New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco or Chicago or Miami can, but they could take a page out of San Antonio’s book. San Antonio is in a similar situation. They’re not a huge city and the Spurs are the only major professional sports team in town (the same is true of OKC, Salt Lake City, Orlando, Sacramento, Portland, and Memphis, some of the most rabid NBA fanbases) so they won’t get a Hall of Fame quarterback as part of the recruiting pitch, but they can control what is in there control, and have the smartest, most cutting edge basketball operations department they can create, and give any player who might be interested the assurance that they will be put in the best position to win.
The biggest reason I feel differently about Durant’s departure from Oklahoma City than I do about LeBron’s Decision to leave Cleveland is because Oklahoma City is lucky to even have an NBA team. KD was not drafted by the Oklahoma City Thunder. He was drafted by the Seattle Supersonics. Remember them? They were this NBA team in Seattle with really good uniforms, who won a Title in the 1970s led by Dennis Johnson, and had an exciting team in the 1990s with Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton that lost to Jordan’s Bulls in the Finals. Also, they were in a real professional sports city that still has baseball and football. Seattle fans got to see Durant’s rookie season, in which he was already really good, and then the owners moved the team to Oklahoma. Sure, Durant is taking his talents to Golden State, but unlike the last NBA city he left, the whole team isn’t coming with him this time. “Oklahoma City Thunder” sounds like a minor league baseball team anyway.
Beyond the people of Oklahoma City, the regular season will suffer the most from Kevin Durant playing for the Warriors. In any given year, we are lucky if there are six or seven teams in the NBA who have a real chance at winning the championship. Last year, there were four (Golden State, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, and Cleveland), and now, barring multiple catastrophic injuries to Golden State’s starters, that number is down to two. If, say Durant and Steph Curry can’t go for the playoffs for the Dubs, then maybe the Spurs or the Clippers could win the West, but otherwise we’re looking at Cleveland vs. Golden State Round 3 next June.
I was hoping that Durant would sign with the Celtics (obviously), but for reasons bigger than just my local fandom. There is no rival for LeBron in the Eastern Conference. LeBron’s team, whether it was Miami or Cleveland, has made the Finals every year since 2011. Every NBA Finals since I’ve been old enough to drink has had LeBron in it. Adding Durant to the Celtics (or Miami, although Boston has the stronger supporting cast especially with Wade leaving for Chicago this week), there would instantly be another contender in the East. The Celtics added Atlanta Hawks veteran big man Al Horford as a maximum contract free agent, whom Oklahoma City was interested in bringing in to play with Durant (Horford also won two National Championships at Florida playing for Billy Donovan), a great young coach in Brad Stevens, a good albeit undersized scorer in Isaiah Thomas, and lots of good, defensively stout role players like Marcus Smart, Jae Crowder, Amir Johnson, and Avery Bradley (who was selected for 1st Team All Defense for the first time in 2015). The Celtics had never landed a big name free agent in their prime, but after Horford agreed to join the Celtics, I talked myself into believing Durant could be the second. They had a good basketball situation to sell to KD, but nothing can compete with the chance to play with Steph Curry and Klay Thompson and Draymond Green and get to play for a coach like Steve Kerr, who is quickly becoming the genius Phil Jackson/Gregg Popovich superstar coach hybrid for the new generation.
While the NBA will not be the most competitive league from top to bottom next season, it will be strangely compelling to see how things unfold for this super-team in Golden State. It’s amazing how quickly this long-suffering franchise, that waited 40 years between titles after Rick Barry’s Warrior team fell apart against Phoenix in 1976 to when Curry and Co. overran LeBron and the Cavs the first time around, turned and replaced LeBron as the NBA’s greatest villain. All eyes will be on the Warriors this year, and most of those eyes will be rooting for failure. This is a team that went 73-9 in the 2015-16 regular season, overcame a 1-3 series deficit against OKC in the Western Conference Finals only to blow a 3-1 series lead against Cleveland in the NBA Finals. They had a chance to be greater than the 1996 Bulls or the 1986 Celtics or any other team in the “greatest team ever” argument, but instead they’re the 18-1 Patriots of basketball. Really good Historically great, but the way it ended will always undercut the achievement. In defeat, the lineup that had been so dominant for two years looked suddenly exposed. LeBron put in a superhuman performance, but for the first time since Mark Jackson was coaching them and the possibility of trading Klay Thompson for Kevin Love seemed like a great idea for Golden State, the Warriors looked human.
First it was Curry’s nagging injuries after a season of abuse by bigger, more physical point guards, neutralizing the effect of the NBA’s first ever unanimous MVP (by the way, the only other players in any sport to be the unanimous MVP are Tom Brady and Wayne Gretzky. Ever heard of them?) and the most unconventional most dominant player basketball has ever seen. Then it was Draymond Green’s suspension. The Dubs were up three games to one on a Cleveland team that was fundamentally flawed, being run by an aging (although it really is amazing how good LeBron James still is considering how long he has been in the NBA, the load he has had to shoulder with relatively weak supporting casts compared to those of Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, or Michael Jordan and the fact that he has NEVER MISSED A FREAKING PLAYOFF GAME despite taking his teams to the Finals SEVEN TIMES including the last six years) superstar, who mortgaged their future two summers ago by trading #1 overall pick Andrew Wiggins to Minnesota for the mostly disappointing Kevin Love, but the suspension of Green for Game 5 gave Cleveland life and gave Cleveland momentum. Then it was the injury to Andrew Bogut, out for the last two games of the Finals, though he should be healthy enough to play for Team Australia in the Olympics this summer. If Bogut was the only thing to go wrong for the Warriors last month, they would be back-to-back champs, they would be the undisputed Greatest Team of All Time, and Bogut himself might still be a Warrior and not a Dallas Maverick, but sometimes the injury to a role player can reveal exactly how fragile the ecosystem of a basketball team really is. Was Kendrick Perkins the most important player on the New Big Three Era Celtics? Of course not, but when he got hurt in the 2010 Finals, it was all over for the Celtics, and the following year when Danny Ainge traded him to the Thunder, the Miami Heat were finally able to beat the Celtics. The Warriors were exposed. LeBron figured them out, and willed Cleveland to a long awaited Title. I’ve never been a huge LeBron fan, and I’ve always said I’d rather see the Browns or (more likely) the Indians be the ones to end Cleveland’s title drought, but I came away from the 2016 Finals impressed. This guy has lived up to as much hype as anyone who was compared to Michael Jordan while still in high school possibly could.
While the Pats took a while to redeem their lost championship, and in the year that followed became the first team since the 1980s to go 11-5 or better and miss the playoffs after Brady hurt his knee, the Warriors are going all in for 2016-17. The spike in the salary cap allowed for them to replace Harrison Barnes with Kevin Durant, and now a team that had three of the league’s best 15 players has four of them. Instead of playing it safe, they put the target on their backs and made the next season all about pursuing immortality all over again. Will they win 74 games this time? Will they get to 75 or 76? Will they sweep the playoffs? Will Steph Curry be okay with the Warriors bringing another MVP winner in his prime? Can Steve Kerr get his four superstars to play together and for each other? Can the Spurs or Clippers possibly keep pace? Can this team win 80 games in the regular season? What happens if they shatter their own win record and struggle in the Finals or against San Antonio? If they win it all will Durant leave? If they do anything short of winning it all, which would be a colossal disappointment, will Durant leave? This season is so inevitable that to quote the great Kevin Garnett, “ANYTHING’S POSSIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” We will see.
One Giant Leap in the Right Direction
You’re not supposed to trade your two best players to title contenders and get better. That shouldn’t work in any sport, but it did for the 2014-15 Boston Celtics. They sent Rajon Rondo to the Dallas Mavericks, and Jeff Green to the Memphis Grizzlies, and then made a run at the postseason. They did not advance beyond their first round opponent. LeBron James’ and Kyrie Irving’s reboot of The Cleveland Show is too talented to let that happen, but there is a lot to be excited about for the future of a team that already has 17 championship banners in the rafters of TD Garden, by far the most by one team in one city in basketball. They got swept, but it does not feel nearly as bad as when the C’s lost to the New York Knicks in 2013, which was the inspiration for the first real sports post I made on this blog nearly two years ago, the last time we saw Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Doc Rivers as Celtics, and certainly not as devastating as the so-close-yet-so-far ending to the 2010 NBA Finals against the Lakers. They had no chance this year. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Cleveland is so good that losing to anyone other than the San Antonio Spurs or the Golden State Warriors (and even then, it would still mean they were in the NBA Finals) would be considered a choke job for the ages. It’s okay that the Celtics not a real contender yet, because the franchise still has so much upside. Let’s take a moment now to appreciate how far they’ve come in such a short period of time.
In December, Danny Ainge traded Rondo, the last remaining player from the 2008 championship team and the 2010 team that made it to a seventh game at Staples Center before bowing out to the Los Angeles Lakers, to the Dallas Mavericks for Jameer Nelson, Brandan Wright, and Jae Crowder what will inevitably be a late 1st round draft pick (because Dallas always makes the playoffs!), and by the trade deadline, all that remained on in Boston’s possession was Crowder and the pick. Doc Rivers is now coaching the Los Angeles Clippers. Paul Pierce is lighting it up in the playoffs for the Washington Wizards. Kevin Garnett went home to the Minnesota Timberwolves to presumably be the Whiplash-esque mentor to 20 year old budding superstar Andrew Wiggins. Glen “Big Baby” Davis is playing meaningful minutes for Doc in LA on what might be the worst bench of any playoff team. Kendrick Perkins is riding the pine in Cleveland (unless he’s going after Jae Crowder). Ray Allen is out of basketball. Brian Scalabrine and Leon Powe are back with the C’s, but in front office or broadcasting capacities. It was a fun ride, but all rides end eventually.
Trading Rondo closed the book on that era of Celtics basketball. His trade to Dallas was supposed to make the Celtics sink further (they had a losing record with him as their starting point guard and captain), improve their standing for the 2015 NBA Draft, and help take the Mavs to the next level. It did none of those things. As it turned out, Crowder was a great fit for the Celtics, and responded really well to Brad Stevens’ coaching. He’s one of those hard working kids from Marquette, who in hindsight was underutilized by Dallas. Rondo, on the other hand, was a terrible fit for Dallas. On a team that plays best when the ball is moving constantly, like Rick Carlisle had the Mavericks doing before Rondo arrived, Rondo is a point guard who wants control, and who wants to be dribbling the ball for the majority of the possession. In an era where the smart teams place emphasis on three pointers and foul shots, Rondo is a bad three point shooter who does not drive to the hoop nearly enough out of fear of having to go to the foul line. He was a bad fit for Rick Carlisle’s offense, and he hasn’t played defense with any kind of consistency since 2012.
When the Celtics traded Jeff Green to Memphis, they got aging veteran Tayshaun Prince in return. The Celtics were able to get more out of Prince than Memphis was, and flipped him at the trade deadline to the Detroit Pistons for Jonas Jerebko and Luigi Datome.This is the second time the Celtics have traded away Jeff Green. The first time was after they drafted him with the #5 pick in the 2007 NBA Draft, and sent him to Seattle (back when Seattle had a team) as one of the pieces that ultimately brought back Ray Allen and Big Baby. History shows us that good things happen when the Celtics trade Jeff Green.
The Celtics are not a contender, and it is not a great place to be in the NBA, if you’re always making the playoffs but never getting anywhere. They have the GM. They have the coach. They have the draft picks. They have the role players. They just need a superstar or two. I didn’t like the taking season. It was mentally exhausting to root for your hometown team to lose to improve draft standing. The Celtics failed to win 30 games in the 2013-14 season, but only landed the #6 pick. The C’s aren’t good at taking. Winning franchises shouldn’t be. Players have too much pride, coaches are too competitive, and even after all the losses, you’re still unlikely to get the ping pong balls to fall in your favor. They could’t get Tim Duncan that way in 1997. They couldn’t get Kevin Durant that way in 2007, and they couldn’t get Andrew Wiggins that way in 2014.
I don;t think the Celtics will be in #8 seed purgatory (or #7 seed purgatory, for that matter. Being the 8th best team would have given them a more competitive opponent in the form of the Atlanta Hawks.) for long, though. The difference between the #11 pick and the #16 pick or whatever, isn’t that great, so making the playoffs doesn’t hurt them in the draft as much as some people think. Getting swept by Cleveland was also a great learning opportunity for Brad Stevens, who coached two Butler University teams to the NCAA National Championship Game, but is younger than Tim Duncan and got his first taste of the NBA playoffs this spring. It’s part of the learning experience for Marcus Smart and Jae Crowder, as they had to guard playoff mode Kyrie Irving and LeBron James.
This is a young team. Marcus Smart is 21. Kelly Olynyk is 24. Jae Crowder is 24. Jared Sullinger is 23. Tyler Zeller is 25. Isaiah Thomas (acquired from the Phoenix Suns at the trade deadline) is 26. Evan Turner is 26. James Young is 19. Even Avery Bradley, who is the longest tenured member of the Celtics, will not turn 25 until November, and was still in high school the last time the Celtics won a title. Maybe LeMarcus Aldridge signs with Boston this summer. Maybe one of the many free agent rim protectors lands here. Maybe they package up some of this talent to get a fully formed superstar. There are still a lot of possibilities, but the step forward the Celtics took this season is encouraging. I would take that over what is going on in Philadelphia or Sacramento every day of the week.
The Past Is the Past
An era of great basketball ended this week. Remember the 2008 Boston Celtics? That was the team that got me back into the NBA and following that league more closely than I ever had before. These days, the Celtics have a much different look, and they’re not a relevant player in the championship discussion the way they were for six straight years. Doc Rivers is now coaching Chris Paul and Blake Griffin in Los Angeles. Kevin Garnett is the veteran leader on a Brooklyn team trying to stay in the playoff picture. Paul Pierce is the veteran presence sent to Washington to teach young stars John Wall and Bradley Beal how to be winners, and is a key part of one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference. Ray Allen is currently unsigned, but not retired, waiting for a title contender in need of his outside shot off the bench. Kendrick Perkins has been playing with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook in Oklahoma City since the Celtics traded him for Jeff Green in the spring of 2011. With the trade that sent Celtics’ captain Rajon Rondo to Dallas earlier this week, the last piece of the starting five that never lost a series, and the last player left from the 2008 championship squad (although Leon Powe has returned to the Celtics to join he front office, and Brian Scalabrine now works as a team broadcaster) has finally left Boston. That era in Celtics basketball is officially over, and it is time to move on. The 2008 Celtics certainly have.
The trade sent Rondo to the Dallas Mavericks for Jameer Nelson, Jae Crowder, and Brandan Wright, as well as a future 1st and 2nd round draft pick. This season, it makes the Mavs better, adding a very good playmaking point guard to a team that already has Dirk Nowitzki, Monta Ellis, and Tyson Chandler. For the Celtics, it completes the process of going young, and gives more power to second year head coach Brad Stevens.The longest tenured Celtics player is now Avery Bradley, a fifth year guard out of the University of Texas, who was drafted by the Celtics in the summer of 2010, just days after the C’s fell to the Los Angeles Lakers in seven games. Rondo’s skill set is at its best when he has great players around him. He played his best basketball when he was passing to KG, Pierce, and Allen: three players who will most definitely find themselves in the Basketball Hall of Fame as soon as they are eligible. With the exception of newcomer center Tyler Zeller, Rondo was not able to do much to elevate the play of his current Celtics teammates, and he is not enough of a scoring force in his own right to make the team competitive right now. Kelly Olynyk and Jared Sullinger are young and talented, and have plenty of upside, but they are nowhere what Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce were in 2008, and they’re nowhere near Dirk or Chandler in 2014. A change of scenery will be good for him, and so will playing for a real championship contender for the first time since the C’s went toe-to-toe with the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals and were still the greatest obstacle standing between LeBron James and a championship ring.
Now is the time to look back on Rondo’s time in Boston. In eight and a half seasons with the Celtics, he was one of the most exciting players in the NBA, as well as one of the most enigmatic. He was a tough competitor, and one of the most intelligent players in the game, but he often seemed bored by the regular season. Bill Simmons wrote of the difference between “Basic Cable Rondo” and “National TV Rondo.” He could have a very average or bad game on a Tuesday night in Milwaukee against an unproven point guard, and be able to flip a switch and transform into a completely different, dialed in player if the game was on ABC and Chris Paul or Steve Nash or Tony Parker was in town. He was an elite passer, but a bad jump shooter. Eventually, his paranoia about shooting from the free throw line limited his drives to the hoop, which were often Boston’s best chance at two points. When he was good, though, he was great. in 2010, 2011, and 2012, he was Boston’s best player in the playoffs. It was in those years that he stopped being the little brother to the New Big Three, and we instead started referring to KG, Pierce, Allen, and Rondo as “The Big Four.” He played through pain, and any frustration fans may have had with the low points of his game was wiped away by how dominant he was in the biggest games of the year. His contract was up at the end of the season, but while it would be nice to see #9 only wear a Celtics uniform for his NBA career, the Celtics should be focused on developing the young talent on their roster rather than maximizing Rondo’s window as a star in this league. Last year, the Celtics needed to evaluate where they were as an organization and they needed to ease Rondo back in his recovery from knee surgery. This season, Rondo has played full time, and they have added guards who were drafted in the first round, and the record was more or less the same as it was a year ago. It was time to move on. It would not surprise me, now that Rondo has been moved, that other veteran players Jeff Green, Brandon Bass, and Gerald Wallace get traded before the end of the 2014-15 season.
One thing that has stuck out to me with the Celtics this season has been how well the rest of the team plays without him. Their biggest win of the season came in a game he did not play, that the Celtics beat Joakim Noah and the Chicago Bulls in Chicago. In another game, Rondo barely played in crunch time down in Washington when rookie point guard Marcus Smart led a comeback against Paul Pierce and the Wizards, only to fall in double overtime against a far superior opponent. Smart was drafted out of Oklahoma State this summer with the sixth overall pick, and whether the Celtics were willing to admit it or not, was intended to be Rondo’s successor.
Kelly Olynyk, who has had his share of struggles since being drafted #13 overall out of Gonzaga in 2013, has really started to come into his own, and has turned into a scorer off the bench. It’s no coincidence, in my opinion, that Olynyk has played better since being removed from the starting lineup. As a reserve, he’s had more playing time with other point guards Evan Turner, Marcus Smart, and Phil Pressey, and he’s developed better chemistry with them than he ever had with Rondo. When Olynyk was drafted, optimistic Celtics fans hoped he had a chance, as a skinny, awkward looking white guy, to be the next Dirk or the next Larry Bird (the two most famous skinny, awkward looking white guys in the history of basketball, and I realize that;s very wishful thinking), and he’s finally living up to that pipe dream a little bit, having his first 30 point game in his NBA career last week. Some of these kids might even be the foundation of the next great Celtics team, but that’s still a few years away.
Playing with better players is not the only reason I think Rajon Rondo will thrive in Dallas. The Mavericks are a very good team in a conference of very good teams, which means that the regular season is basically already the playoffs if you’re in the Western Conference. If there was ever a situation that would allow a team to get “National TV Rondo” night in and night out, this is it. There’s Chris Paul in Los Angeles, Goran Dragic and Isaiah Thomas in Phoenix, Ty Lawson in Denver, Steph Curry in Golden State, Damian Lillard in Portland, Tony Parker in San Antonio, Russell Westbrook in Oklahoma City, Dante Exum in Utah, Mike Conley, Jr. in Memphis, and Jrue Holiday in New Orleans. There is an abundance of good point guards in the NBA (I mean, the Celtics had three on their roster after trading Rondo even if Jameer Nelson didn’t come to Boston in that deal), and that is most apparent in the West. He will not be able to check out mentally or take any nights off. He has his work cut out for him, and it should be a fun thing to watch.
The Celtics now find themselves rebuilding with a great college coach and the champions of years past are not walking though that door. As Celtics fans, we’ve seen this movie before, but it doesn’t seem that bad. Brad Stevens seems to be more comfortable in the NBA than Rick Pitino did, and he’s not hung up on the possibility of drafting a franchise changing player with the #1 overall pick like the C’s were banking on with some guy named Tim Duncan in 1997. It doesn’t happen overnight, but the Celtics seem to be heading in the right direction long term. Danny Ainge knows what he’s doing, and he’s built the Celtics into a winner before. They are young, they play hard, and the best basketball for the players on that team is still in the future. What Rondo did in Boston was great, but like Doc, KG, Pierce, Allen, and Perk before him, it’s time for something new.
