BSG's Celtics Chronicles & Retrospective

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

Celtics Chronicles 

HTTP://WWW.BOSTONSPORTSGUY.COM -- 2nd POSTING, 9:00pm, 4/19

4/19 EDITION: SG sifts through the rubble from the Pitino Era and
wonders how the Celts could have landed Duncan AND McGrady



Year Three of the Pitino Era ends tonight against the Knicks. Let's take
a few moments to reflect among ourselves, shall we? Take a deep breath,
relax, wash the bitterness from your body, clear your mind. And if you
keep hearing a loud noise in the background, that's just me slamming my
head against my desk.

Let's begin...

(THWACK!)

(SLAM!)

Ow!!!!!

(KA-POW)

Ouch!!!!

(THWACKKKK!!!!!!)

Dammit... that's gonna leave a mark...

(WHAMMMM!)

(CRACK!!!!!!)

Uh-oh... I think my left eye is starting to close...

(SPLAT!!!!!!)

Hold on a second...

Where was I?

In a bitter disappointment to everyone involved, especially the fans,
the Celtics aren't much closer to being a championship-caliber team than
they were three summers ago. Thanks to Rick Pitino and Chris Wallace,
the franchise is actually more crippled than they were when ML Carr
called the shots. At least after Uncle ML departed to pursue a career in
the custodial arts, he left the Celtics with Antoine Walker and two of
the top six picks in the '97 Draft. If Pitino left town right now, he
would only leave a trail of mistakes and broken hearts.

We all know that hindsight is 20/20, but the fact remains that things
COULD have been different here -- had Team Pitino done a few things
differently, this team would find itself in better shape, both in the
short-term and for the long haul. As most divorced men could tell you,
sometimes sports resembles marriage -- it's not about the deals you make
but the deals you don't make. 

Consider this fact: Looking back, the Celtics could have ended up with a
starting lineup that included Tracy McGrady and David Wesley PLUS about
$10 million to spend this summer for a free agent like Tim Duncan.
Amazing but true.

 How would this team look going into Opening Night next November?

C - Tim Duncan
F - Antoine Walker
F - Tracy McGrady
G - Paul Pierce
G - David Wesley
Bench -- Andrew DeClerq, Dana Barros, Adrian Griffin, Derek Anderson.

As we're about to show you, things could have turned out that way. So
strap on your seatbelts, slap on a protective safety helmet and come
along as we travel back in time and wade though a litany of misfires,
mis-signings and bad trades...


***** ***** ***** ***** *****

First things first: Here's how the Celtics roster looks right now:

Guys whose contracts expire this season
Pervis Ellison (final year, $2.78 million)
Danny Fortson (final year, 1.67 million)
Adrian Griffin (league minimum)
Doug Overton (league minimum)

Guys signed past 2001
Antoine Walker (six years, $71 million, exp. 2005)
Vitaly Potapenko (six years, $33 million, exp. 2005)
Eric Williams (six years, $27 million, exp. 2004)
Kenny Anderson (seven years, $50 million, exp. 2003)
Walter McCarty (three years, $9 million, exp. 2002)
Cal Cheaney (three years, $6 million, exp. 2002)
Paul Pierce (four years, $7 million, exp. 2002)

Guys whose contracts expire at the end of 2001
Dana Barros (6 yrs, $20 million)
Greg Minor (5 years, $13.5 million).

The Celtics will fall about $2-to-$3 million over next season's $38
million cap, assuming Griffin doesn't get the Walter McCarty Memorial
"You can't get this anywhere else in the NBA, but here's three
guaranteed years and $9 million bucks, anyway" deal. Aside from Danny
Fortson's inevitable departure, everybody else on this team will be
returning next season. Trades? Probably not. None of the Celtics carry
trade value except for Pierce (he's not going anywhere) or Walker
(nobody wants his contract, but he DOES have value).

Could things have turned out differently? Let's look back at the five
major moves Boston made during the Pitino Era, all of which I defended
at the time for various reasons (in my defense, I'm not the one making
$50 million to run a basketball team).

1. The Travis Knight signing
They gave an outright stiff $21 million dollars spread over seven
years... to make matters worse, they renounced David Wesley and Rick Fox
to create enough cap room for the deal. Although they salvaged this move
with the Tony Battie trade, would you rather have Battie or Wesley (a
borderline All-Star with considerably more trade value)? Remember, if
they re-signed Wesley, Kenny Anderson would be shoveling snow in Toronto
right now.

(Note: As the story goes, Pitino was never convinced that Wesley could
play the point and worried about on-court tension between Wesley and
Walker.)

2. The Chris Mills signing
Here's something everyone wishes NEVER happened. Pitino handed the
veteran forward a startling $25 million, six-year deal, decided he
didn't fit into his system and traded him before the first game of the
season for three young forwards (Walter McCarty, John Thomas and Dontae
Jones). Only McCarty remains with the team; he parlayed a decent '98
season into that ludicrous three-year contract extension that keeps me
awake some nights.

3. The Kenny Anderson trade
After 50 games of the '98 season, Pitino gave up on his rookie point
guard and dealt Billups and Brown for the disgruntled Anderson and his
enormous, eye-popping $50 million contract. Although Anderson played
well for extended stretches this season, the Celtics would NEVER make
this deal again -- at the time, Pitino thought he was obtaining a former
All-Star who could return to All-Star form in Pitino's system. Didn't
happen. They could have kept Wesley -- a better player, especially
defensively -- for less than half of Anderson's money.

(One excuse for Pitino here: After the new bargaining agreement was
hammered out in January of '99, teams realized they were better off
keeping young players over veterans with big contracts. Part of the
motivation behind dealing Billups was that the Celtics didn't think they
could afford huge extensions down the road for Walker and the two
rookies. As it turned out, neither Billups nor Mercer would have
commanded much money on the open market; even if they did, the Celts
could have set them free and used their money for someone else. Pitino
never realized the rules would change so drastically.)

4. The Vitaly Potapenko trade
Back in March of '99, the Celts moved quickly on Cleveland's backup
center, giving up a lottery-protected 1999 pick and a serviceable backup
(DeClerq) and immediately inking Potapenko to a mammoth $33 million
extension. When the pick didn't fall in the top three, the Cavs grabbed
it and drafted promising point guard Andre Miller. Ouch. To make matters
worse, the Celts lusted after rookie Shawn Marion, who ended in Phoenix
(at #9) and looks like a future star, someone who would have thrived in
Boston between Walker and Pierce.

I defended this deal up until last February, when a reader e-mailed me
the following question: if Cleveland offered us DeClerq and Miller for
Potapenko, would the Celts make that deal? Hmmmm...

(THWACK!!!!!)

Obviously, they would. In this case, Pitino and Wallace (as well as
yours truly) grossly misinterpreted the bargaining agreement and the cap
rules -- these days, you're much better off having a #1 pick and a cheap
role player than an expensive veteran who's not even a star. You wonder
why Boston didn't wait until the summer and try to make a sign-and-trade
deal with Cleveland, whose options were limited because they were
already paying big bucks for another center (Zydrunas Ilgauskas).

Again, I still like Potapenko for his toughness and his underrated
defense, just not for $33 million and not at the expense of a #1 pick.
Pitino was dead-wrong here; so was I. At the very least, they should
have refused to make that deal unless the pick was protected in the Top
Eight.

5. The Ron Mercer trade
Maybe Pitino's biggest misfire. We all agreed that Mercer wasn't the
best fit for Boston and we all agreed that he wasn't worth more than the
$28 million they offered him last summer... but in retrospect, it made
NO SENSE to deal him for two players that further hampered their cap
room (Fortson and Williams). Why not let Mercer play out the season and
either do a sign-and-trade after the year or simply let him go and sign
someone else?

And the players they received were all wrong for this team -- Fortson
made no sense if they didn't plan on playing Walker at small forward,
and Williams made no sense because he still had $22 million and five
years remaining on his contract. In this day and age, you can't afford
to tie up your cap with the Eric Williams's of the world, even if you're
getting a future #1 pick and dumping Popeye Jones' contract in the deal
(another botched signing, if you're keeping score).

The end result? Instead of emulating teams like Orlando and Chicago and
eschewing the "quick fix" trades, showing some patience, riding out ML
Carr's bad contracts, taking some lumps along the way and biding time
until the cap problems straightened out, Team Pitino exacerbated all of
these headaches with those five aforementioned moves. At least ML had
the sense to stop giftwrapping senseless contracts and start building
for the future (which he did with the Dallas trade that netted the team
Walker and another #1 pick back in '96).

Here's the kicker: We never imagined anyone could inflict more damage on
the Celtics franchise than ML, but Pitino only made one positive move in
three years -- picking Paul Pierce after Pierce fell into Boston's lap
at #10 in the '98 Draft.


***** ***** ***** ***** *****

Let's play the hindsight game... here's what could have happened had
Pitino and Wallace shown more patience and a little creativity over the
past three years. Again, in their defense, I agreed with almost every
one of their moves when they happened (with the exception of the Mills
signing):

SCENARIO #1
Say the Celts picked Ron Mercer and Chauncey Billups in the '97 Draft,
signed Andrew DeClerq and Travis Knight (and subsequently traded Knight
for Tony Battie in the winter of '98), re-signed Antoine Walker to the
$71 million extension and decided against making any other major moves
over the next three seasons. Let's also pretend that they did NOT sign
Chris Mills, which they never should have done, anyway. And let's say
they never gave Battie that $24 million contract extension at the end of
last summer, another thing they never should have done. 

In other words, pretend that nothing major happened after the summer of
'97. Here's how Boston's salary cap would shape up:

Guys whose contracts expire this season
Mercer ($2.3 million), Billups ($3.1 million), Battie ($2.6 million),
Ellison ($2.78 million), Griffin (minimum), Dee Brown ($4 million).

Guys signed past 2001
Walker, DeClerq, the 1998 #1 pick (Pierce), the 1999 #1 pick (Player X).

Guys whose contracts expire at the end of 2001
Barros, Minor.

By my calculations, Boston's salary cap would have been around $22
million this summer, or about $16 million under the salary cap. That's
more than enough money to court Duncan and a second-tier free agent
(Cuttino Mobley or Derek Anderson) AND re-sign some of the key free
agents on the team (they could have gone over the cap to re-sign Mercer,
Billups and Battie).

Would they have taken some lumps in the mean time? Obviously. They
wouldn't have started a true center for the past three years -- although
an athletic DeClerq-Battie combo would have been somewhat serviceable --
and Billups/Brown/Barros would have struggled to co-exist at the point
guard position. The team itself probably would have resembled that
athletic, balls-to-the-wall squad from the '97-'98 season; if Billups
panned out, they may have even contended for a playoff spot this season
(I never liked Chauncey's game, but I've been wrong before, as you can
tell from my flip-flop on just about every signing/trade in this
column).

Still, ask yourself this question: Would you rather be a 25-win team
with cap room and hope... or a 35-win team with no cap room and little
hope?

SCENARIO #2
Say Boston re-signed David Wesley in the summer of '97 for six years and
$20 million (exactly what he received from Charlotte); remember, Pitino
recently admitted that letting Wesley leave was the biggest mistake he
made during his Boston reign. With Wesley and Barros manning the point,
the Celts never would have taken Billups with the 3rd pick; they
probably would have grabbed Mercer at #3 and either traded down from the
6th pick or taken a younger project (either Tim Thomas or Tracy McGrady,
both of whom emerged as more valuable players than either of Boston's
picks). 

For the sake of this argument, let's say that they gambled on McGrady at
#6. That pick made perfect sense for them -- he was coming out of high
school and Pitino had probably recruited him for Kentucky that spring,
so he must have known about McGrady's raw talent. In retrospect, it's
difficult to believe that they passed him up, especially with the way he
played in Toronto this season (they took him with the 9th pick in '97).

So we'll give them Mercer, McGrady and Wesley... re-signing Wesley would
have made it impossible to sign Travis Knight, definitely a good thing.
And maybe the C's could have survived for one season with a small lineup
and addressed the center position after the lockout ended.

Just for fun, let's say they pulled the trigger on that Potapenko trade
last February. How would this lineup look?

Guys whose contracts expire this season
Mercer, McGrady, Ellison, Griffin, Brown.

Guys signed past 2001
Wesley, Walker, Potapenko, the 1998 #1 pick (Pierce).

Guys whose contracts expire at the end of 2001
Barros, Minor.

In this scenario, they would still be sitting about $9-to-10 million
under the cap and angling for Duncan; it's conceivable that they would
have dealt Mercer for a pick last summer to give McGrady more playing
time (remember, they could have signed a marquee free agent, then gone
over the cap to re-sign McGrady). Either way, the future would seem
considerably brighter in Boston.


***** ***** ***** ***** *****

Facts are facts: Pitino has been a bitter disappointment, both as a
coach and as a talent evaluator. Look at the coaching job Doc Rivers did
in Orlando this year, taking an overachieving, undermanned team within
one game of the playoffs. Wasn't that supposed to happen here with Coach
P? And look at the foresight Orlando and Chicago have shown with the
cap, or the ingenuity of Toronto, Minnesota and Indiana in gambling on
raw high school talents like McGrady, Al Harrington and Kevin Garnett.
Wasn't Pitino supposed to be the savior, the guy who was always one step
ahead of the pack, the 21st century Auerbach, the savior?

Boston fans would have accepted Coach P telling them, "I'm not making
any panic moves... I want to ride out the next three years, build the
team around Antoine and wait until we have some cap room to make some
major moves." But he couldn't do it. Instead of regrouping and waiting
for all the scars from the ML Carr Era to heal, Pitino tried to turn
this team around as fast as possible. And he only ended up making things
worse. 

Think of it this way: It's like Pitino bought a Stouffer's french bread
pizza and knew it took 10 minutes to preheat the oven and 15 minutes to
cook the pizza if he wanted it really crispy. So he thought about it and
said, "I'll just microwave the damned thing -- it will be just as good
and it takes 3 minutes. I'm hungry RIGHT NOW!!!!" 

And we all know that french bread pizza tastes lousy if you microwave
it. You need to stick it in the oven and let it bake until it's ready...
and you can't keep opening the oven door and peeking in and changing the
toppings every 30 seconds. There's a lesson there somewhere.