Celtics thoughts

[Alex Wang <awang@mit.edu>]

I've been contemplating the future of the Celtics. I think you have
to begin with the core players of the Celtics, Antoine Walker and
Paul Pierce. In my opinion, Walker has the better potential of the
two because his nonscoring skills, excluding defense, are superior.
There are times when he dominates the game through his rebounding,
ballhandling, and passing. Of course this is arguable because Pierce
is a fine player also who rebounds well for his position, can score
inside and out, anticipates on defense and probably has the potential
to be a better man-to-man defender.

Pierce has better value in trade because he is not a base-year player
and he has a low salary. Right now I doubt that we can get enough
value in return to justify a trade of Pierce though. At first I 
thought that we might have a shot at one of the disgruntled free
agents like McGrady (who I thought was overrated at the beginning
of the season - shows what I know about evaluating NBA talent
potential). But upon re-reading the salary cap FAQ it seems like
base year compensation might make very difficult.

My assumption for now is that we are going to build around a core
of Walker and Pierce. Everyone else is expendable. So the question
is, what kind of players do you complement them with? You have
two guys who are going to give you roughly 40 ppg, and most of
the offense is going through them. They are going to draw double
teams frequently. They give you a fair amount of rebounding although
Walker seems to have trouble with the more athletic rebounders.
What they don't have is great athleticism, toughness, experience, 
and defense, especially interior defense.

When you look at it this way, you can see what Pitino was trying
to do, although the result hasn't been great. Anderson is there to
provide experience. Potapenko gives toughness and some interior
defense. Fortson gives toughness and rebounding. Mercer was shipped
out because a guy who doesn't give you much except on-the-ball 
scoring doesn't fit. The thing is, when you put it all together,
the team we ended up with was both young and unathletic. I think
what Pitino decided was, we have some core guys who are unathletic
so we're not going to press and run, so let's just have a whole
team that is unathletic - tough like the Knicks, say. I think you 
can definitely have a team that is experienced and unathletic,
because veteran teams know how to play team offense and defense,
and a lot of them have good team shooting also. But young and
unathletic is tough to win with, maybe impossible, and Pitino is
not the guy who can pull it off.

So that is where we are at. We are stuck with some pieces like
Anderson, Potapenko, and Fortson who have talent but are not great
fits with this team. I think that the recent draft showed that
Pitino is going to make a big push to get more athletic, and he's
willing to pay a lot for it.

Onto some individual moves:

1) Jermaine O'Neal. Now three first round picks is a steep price
to pay for a guy who is so unproven. One thing that I haven't
seen mentioned is the fact that he is a base-year player. I imagine
that a third team (probably the Clippers) would be involved, and
they get a draft pick to compensate them for taking a bad contract
from us. It sounded like they expected him to make a major impact
this year so I would have expected him in the starting lineup at
either 4 or 5. For what it's worth, he was 10th in the league in
blocks per 48 minutes. The main thing that I see from this is that
Pitino is now willing to trade the future for present success.
I can see the appeal though, because the guy is 21 years old, 
athletic, can possibly grow into a true center, and supposedly
kicks butt in Portland practices. How many athletic, decently
skilled centers are there in the league, 5? Still, a huge risk.

2) Jerome Moiso. I can see why he was taken over Alexander, because
Alexander was praised as someone who could create his own shot - 
a vital talent in the NBA but actually one that doesn't fit that
well with our talent. Beyond that he was a senior so that probably
hurt the evaluation of his upside (it sounds unfair but from what
I've read, that's how it is). Moiso sounds like someone who can
contribute without demanding the ball, like Marion did for Pheonix
this past season. Disclaimer though: I've never seen the guy play.
I think the comparisons to McCarty and Battie, and Garnett of
course, are premature. He sounds like he can play some small forward.

3) Danny Fortson. I thought he was gone without compensation but
then there was that recent NY Post article about a trade for Childs.