Re: coaches

[j.hironaka@unesco.org]

I consider myself a critic of Slick Ricky, but I have oddly never felt any urge to
criticize his personnel moves. Weird, I guess.

Like all of you, I've been a Celts fans throughout the past six-year playoff
drought. Setting all biases aside, I don't recall ever feeling even remotely as
positive as I do now about the potential upside of the Celts personnel. The
operative word is "potential" (in both a positive and negative sense).

To my knowledge, RP's predecessors in Boston (Ford, Rodgers, Carr) never
demonstrated that they were thinking beyond a one year horizon, or actively
looking to acquire the type of athletes with the potential to be have far bigger
years ahead of them. IMO, the most important thing Pitino did was recognize what
the word "rebuilding" actually means.

Sorry ML, but it does NOT mean "stocking your team with players that can help
scrape you into the 16-team playoff format." To Pitino, it really means making
room for players that have the talent to develop into championship-level athletes,
even if they might regularly get badly beaten in the short term by less talented
yet veteran NBA players (Wesley, Fox etc.)

It also means picking up a lot of hit-or-miss, minimum-wage players (Ty Edney,
Ringo DeClerq) to try to create cap flexibility, even if it means having to lose a
few more meaningless games in the short run than you might if you had kept your
bench stocked by resigning your veterans (again Wesley, Fox etc.).

I don't recall Pitino's predecessors in Boston EVER even raising the subject of
creating cap maneuverability as part of the rebuilding process. ML Carr's attitude
was : "if I have room under the cap, then my obligation is to spend it right away
on a veteran player that our fans have heard of." For some reason, the signing of
Antique Wilkins galled me much more than the often-criticized signing of yet
another off-guard midget (Dana Barros) to start alongside Dee Brown. I remember
comparing the signing of Wilkins to the acquisition of Bob McAdoo in 1978. I
thought it was the beginning of a long, well-deserved decline in the team's
fortunes.

I don't feel this way anymore (at all). Fine, one can compare the mediocre
won-loss record of RP with his predecessors, but not the way improved athleticism
or upside of the players. From my point of view, I think RP has accomplished
exactly what he set out to do in his first two seasons (build a nucleus of
talented players he can work with). He shouldn't sweat it now just because the
ride so far hasn't been as smooth as fans had hoped.

This may sound strange at first, but I think the Boston Celtics are at a stage of
development exactly like that of Dallas back when they had successively drafted
the likes of Jason Kidd, Jim Jackson & Mashburn (or also the Washington team of
Webber, Howard etc.). The thing is that the Dallas management panicked when their
kids played "below their talent level". They broke up the young nucleus instead of
sticking by them and recognizing that inconsistent play and weak team chemistry
are pretty much natural occurrences when you are led by extra-headstrong,
extra-talented young players (like the kind that brought championships to Detroit
and Chicago). As a result, all those guys are now mature 25-to-28-year-old
contributors on solid playoff teams (except Juwan Howard who stayed put), while
teams like Dallas keep spinning their wheels with a new collection of talented,
underachieving young players each year.

Egged on by the media, Rick Pitino will be under great pressure to do something
dramatic this summer and break up a significant part of what he has already built
(call it the "Dallas Method"). I think that would be a shame, because 1) we have
better talent now than Dallas or Washington ever had; and 2) under the
circumstances, we are not really that far behind schedule when compared to the
Detroit or Chicago championship teams. After all, how bright was the outlook for
Chuck Daly or Phil Jackson after year two of their regimes?

Sorry folks, I don't know why I post long messages like this.

Joe