Re: The Boston Celtics Mailing List Digest V6 #374

[j.hironaka@unesco.org]

"pgoggin@uh.healthbridge.org" wrote:

>         You bring up some great points about Walker's defense.  While distractible at times as you mention, he is also, I believe, our best one-on-one defender, when motivated.  Everyone mentions his spirited defense of Tim Hardaway at the end of the late-season Miami game, but they fail to notice that Walker has one of these episodes in almost every game (that I've watched.)  One episode, usually when he gets pissed off, when he decides to meet the ball at half court or when he switches on to a guard out behind the line, slaps the ground, gets down with his elbows out wide, and just shuts the guy down.  He has it in him and I can't wait to see him at SF.  Most of all, I can't wait to see hapless SF's and SG's trying to guard our oversized duo in the low post (....)

Hi Patrick:
You really should post your impressions directly to the list, so others can benefit from it (as I did) or also challenge it as is their right (parden me for taking the liberty). One of the positives of having Antoine play small forward is that he will be a lot more visible when playing defense, so fans can finally objectively judge for themselves whether he's a matador defender, rather than trust Peter May's matter-of-fact opinion on that issue. No question Antoine always has that skill to do the job athletically like nobody's business, but he'll need to be in top condition to do this play after play rather than once a game. Each time he lets his guard down with false hustle, he will get burned. Watching Ron Mercer and Kenny Anderson all season showed me that you can't hide from the camera when you play perimeter ball defense. The rule changes may affect Pierce and Toine as well, and we're likely to see foul trouble early in the year throughout the league.

In an ideal world, Toine's new defensive assignments will pose enough of a personal challenge for him that he'll instinctly bear down, work hard, and carry over that focus into the offensive end as well. The deep crouch we know he loves to droo down into is a thrill for fans, because it shows-off how cat quick he is for a player of any size and hints that he plans to do his job in an intimidating way as possible. Toine actually peaks right up into the dribblers eyes from down there, and his arms look so wide and low that they seem to wrap around his man a meter in each direction. When fans say "Walker is too slow to play the three" (or "Pierce is too slow to play two"), I think they are making reasonably safe-sounding, knee-jerk generalizations based on the size of each player, rather than focusing on what's actually there. Pitino determined that Pierce was an equal or better ball defender than Mercer quite early in the season. Anyone would have.

Based on the evidence next year, we can all judge for ourselves whether Antoine is "muy wimpo matadoro chiquita" or not. He can't blame the trap system if he fails to fight through screens etc. He'll have nowhere to hide.

Joe

p.s. I kind of enjoy that all of us are there among the "top 10 percentile" of Boston fans (the number who on average chose the Boston Celtics as their favorite local team in the recent poll). Still, I don't know why two different Globe columnists are making a big deal of this "new" finding or even using it to condemn Pitino. With the exception of the Larry Bird era, it went without saying that the team that brought Boston 16 championships lagged in popularity/attendance far behind the Bruins and Red Sox. While on this subject, one rarely challenged sterotype that irritates me is that basketball players are so uniquely under-educated. Surely 90% or more of caucasian hockey and tennis players have never set foot on a college campus, and may not even have a high school equivalency diploma before joining the junior circuit fulltime. If pro basketball players had an equally limited exposure to education, you'd naturally expect to see just as many goons fighting and tantrum throwing as
you do in those other sports, minus the sticks, rackets and blades.

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