Antoine Calls Booing Unprofessional; Buckley Suggests Pitino Going Way Of Calipari

[Way Of The Ray <wayray@ix.netcom.com>]

                  Boston Herald
                                
                  Booing C's the right Choice               
                  by Steve Buckley                      

                  Monday, March 22, 1999
              
                  John Calipari got the gate as head coach of the New Jersey
                  Nets and landed in an analyst's chair at ESPN. Meanwhile,
                  Rick Pitino is looking more and more as though he's on his
                  way to landing in an analyst's couch.

                  Face it, folks, these are not happy times for the
                  President for Life of the Boston Celtics. If the high
                  point of Pitino's tenure with the Celtics was that hot day
                  in 1997 when he was unveiled as the new leader of the
                  franchise, then yesterday was surely the low point.

                  The bow-wow Celtics came out on the wrong end of a 95-92
                  overtime loss to the bow-wow Chicago Bulls at the
                  FleetCenter, and, when it was over, Pitino looked spent
                  and stooped over. He talked his usual talk, but it was all
                  just words. Pitino seemed unable to find a silver lining,
                  or a moral, or some of glass-is-half-filled optimism, and
                  no amount of ``Success is a Choice'' spin control was
                  going to make things OK.

                  ``I give credit to Chicago,'' Pitino said. ``They made
                  some good plays down the stretch.''

                  The Bulls? Made some nice plays? The Bulls?

                  These are not the Bulls of Michael Jordan and Scottie
                  Pippen and Dennis Rodman. The Bulls of 1999 are like
                  Confederate money: Once valuable, now worthless. These
                  Bulls are the basketball equivalent of the replacement
                  baseball teams that invaded spring training in 1995: A
                  bunch of nobodies and has-beens wearing big-league
                  uniforms.

                  There are no givens in professional sports, but this was
                  just about as close to a 2-foot putt that the Celtics were
                  going to get. And they lost. Perhaps the real tragedy was
                  that this horrible game had to sleepwalk into overtime,
                  which is like the Hollywood people adding another five
                  minutes to ``The Waterboy.'' But they played the OT
                  anyway, and it didn't go over well with those folks who
                  decided to remain until the end.

                  ``Most of the time we took some really great shots,''
                  Pitino said. ``But I think there's a lot of negativity in
                  the air and the guys are a little nervous about it.''

                  Negativity?

                  ``The booing,'' Pitino said. ``I think we deserve the
                  occasional boo and so forth. But this team, they want to
                  win. . . . We're not performing the way we should, all of
                  us, and I put myself at the top of the heap.''

                  To label what the fans laid on the Celtics yesterday as
                  ``negativity'' would be akin to calling the Blizzard of
                  '78 ``precipitation.'' The Celtics stunk, and that's why
                  they were hooted off the court.

                  Later, Pitino was asked to comment on the perception that
                  his players are not listening to him, that they may have
                  tuned him out - the way the Nets did with Coach Cal.

                  ``If I thought they weren't listening,'' Pitino said, ``I
                  wouldn't play them.''

                  Oh? Perhaps Coach Rick should get a videotape of
                  yesterday's game and fast-forward it to the third period.
                  During a timeout, some kid was brought out to the parquet
                  to take part in one of those contests in which a lucky fan
                  can win a new car by connecting on a shot from halfcourt.
                  But while Pitino was outlining the next play some of his
                  players were looking out to the court to see if the kid
                  was going to land his shot.

                  The kid missed. But the shot was a lot closer to the net
                  than most of Antoine Walker's shots yesterday.

                  Look, everyone wants to see Pitino be successful in his
                  rebuilding effort with the Celtics. Everyone wants the
                  team to reach back in time and snatch some of the magic
                  from the glory days of Russell, Havlicek, Bird and the
                  rest. Everyone wants them to be . . . fun.

                  But the Celtics were not fun yesterday. They were lousy
                  and they were boring, and, on this day, it was hard to
                  settle back and accept their play as just a pothole on the
                  road to success.

                  Asked about all the booing that landed on the Celtics,
                  Walker at first said that it didn't bother him, that it
                  goes with the territory. But then, without even stopping
                  for air, he said that the booing is ``unprofessional.''

                  Um, no. What's unprofessional is the way Celtics are
                  playing, except that they are making millions of dollars.

                  As for Coach Pitino, he must be wondering if ESPN has a
                  company policy on the number of coaching geniuses it hires
                  during one NBA season.