bskball.com Celtics Column

["Ozersky, Joshua A" <OzerskyJA@corning.com>]

The End of the Affair


The Celtics have thrown away this season.  It's over.  We are 
eleven games under .500,have lost in every imaginable way, 
suffered every ignominy.  Rick Pitino has even flipped his wig 
and reviled the Boston fans from his bully pulpit as Press Conference
 Pundit in charge of Explaining Losses.   Fans everywhere are 
arguing whether Pitino is more inept as a coach or as a GM, 
and forming pools as to when he will depart, and how many years 
after his departure it will be before the organization can recover.  
The general consensus seems to be that Paul Pierce's grandson 
will be playing for our next title contender.

So why am I not more upset?

Longtime readers of this column will probably roll their eyes at 
this point.  I have indeed overdone it on the first-person business, 
foregrounding my own agonies as I lived and died with the Celtics
 this year.  But I think I represent a lot of hardcore Celtics fans 
out there, and I think that like a lot of them, I have performed a 
psychic intervention on myself.  See, we couldn't be blamed for 
constantly waiting for the turnaround to happen.  The Celtics 
always got turnarounds, and also could count on more motivated 
players - "our kind of guys" was the usual expression - who would 
naturally beat up on the jaded mercenaries who played for other 
squads.  Even during the ML Carr era we expected help around 
the corner.  And when the Pitino era began, in that wonderful first 
year, it seemed like all the pain and strife were well worthwhile.  
That the Celtics mattered again.  Even Bob Ryan bought into it. 
 Now Pitino is telling fans, "Larry Bird is not about to walk through
 that door.  Kevin McHale is not walking through that door....
what you have is a young team that is learning and improving..." 
etc.  etc.  But as the Boston Herald's Michael Gee has pointed out, 
it's Pitino's own doing that we all had such high expectations.  
He did himself, and our belief in him built a spiral of ruinous optimism.

Which has now exhausted itself.  Before going farther, I will say that I 
believe I have found a specific culprit for the team's poor play, a player
 on the squad whose removal may yet ressurrect the dreams of Celtic
 glory which now seem so utterly buried.  But before revealing this culprits
 name and deeds, I think we need to face some facts about the rest of the 
team, so that we can speak intelligently about retooling it for next year.  
That is, after all, our only pleasure in life, right?

Team Defense:  the Celtics have abandoned their full court press, and it has 
caused havoc for us.  Pitino's press made his teams special, exciting to watch 
and a nightmare to play against.  But once teams got through it, the skinny, 
fast big men whom Pitino utilized for that style were unable to cope with the
 low-post he-men who get you points in the NBA.  The team was getting 
murdered down low, so Pitino went out and got a 2nd tier starting center, 
a big strong guy who could score and defend, but who wasn't a shot blocker 
and who didn't have the body to run around on the press like a Mark Pope 
or Travis Knight.  So the Celtics are now a halfcourt team, and have to play
man to man defense on every possession.  Because they do try hard much 
of the time, and are well coached and constantly berated, they can be pretty 
good.  (Vince Carter was contained for almost all of the recent Toronto game, 
until he made that ridiculous circus shot, and even that was a desperation 
heave caused by tight D by Adrian Griffin.)  But for some reason, they often 
don't come to play, and I think I know the reason.  They are a bad team.  
They don't play hard all the time, and they are mentally lazy.  Nor is Antoine 
Walker, their most important player, in very good shape, so you could call him 
physically lazy, too.

Team Offense:  the Celtics are a bad team.  They don't pass the way they should.
  They try to take guys one on one.  They don't shoot free throws well.  They force
 shots up.  They settle for the perimter, instead of taking it inside.  They don't have confidence.  All the players except for Paul Pierce and Kenny Anderson have 
gotten much worse offensively, which is a sure sign of bad chemistry.  (On good 
teams, guys play offense better than they would were they alone).  Eric Williams 
can't score anymore?  Calbert Cheaney can't hit a jump shot?  These guys clearly 
have more on their minds than the defender in front of them.  

Individual Players:
Paul Pierce:  Bill Simmons, the "Boston Sports Guy" who writes a hilarious and 
insightful column for Digital City Boston, often complains that Pierce hasn't improved
 since his first season.  I disagree.  For all practical purposes, this is his first season. 
 You can't call two months of lockout ball "a season."  And anyway, he has improved.
  He's diversified his game, picked up a fake-and-step under step that is maturing into 
a go-to move, improving on defense, etc.  BUT.  Pierce has either been incredibly
 unlucky or is not taking care of his body, because it has been one injury after another
 with him all year.  Nor does he seem to be in the same league as Vince or Kobe when
 it comes to cardiovascular shape.  But then Paul's body - the way his shoulders 
slope and his head hangs - are misleading anyway.  He doesn't look as good 
as he is.   And he is very, very good.  I would say that he is a step below 
Kobe as the best young 2 guard in the league, and about even with Vince, 
although clearly Vince is having a better year.  Carter scores more points, 
because he is the focal point of the Raptor's offense (he took something like 
35 shots to get his fifty two weeks ago) and is a better athlete than Pierce 
generally speaking.  But Paul is a much, much better defender.  It's not even 
close.  

Antoine:  what do you not know about Antoine by this point.  I think the one 
thing that hasn't been stressed enough about him is his physical conditioning, 
which is the source of much of the friction between he and Pitino.  When 
he plays smart, he is a marquee talent with immense upside.  But even then 
his lack of hops and agility hurt him.  He has had more shots blocked than 
any player I know.  He is too often beat by guy who just aren't that fast - 
Larry Johnson comes to mind.  And he rebounding is a scandal, given what 
we saw two years ago.  People talk about trading him next year, and it could 
happen.  But we have to get a marquee talent in return, not just some tough-guy
 veteran like Dale Davis.  Base-year compensation rules decree that we can
 get somebody making around 7.5 million a year for him, and there are still 
great talents to be found at that price-though probably not on teams that 
have cap room for his salary.

Potapenko:  Love him, love his game.  No complaints here.  Could start on any
 number of good playoff teams.  Put him in Sabonis's slot and the Trailblazers 
win even more games.  One of Pitino's best trades.

Griffith:  terrific find.  No complaints here.  

Kenny Anderson.  I have left Kenny for last, because I have been thinking a lot 
about him.  This is definitely a great year for Kenny.  All the people that said he 
was a bum and a washout have had to eat their words.  Kenny has played all 
year, played through pain, played defense, and is putting up good numbers every 
night.  He is a true clutch player and undoubtedly has won more games for us 
than any other Celtic.  That is why it took me a long time to come to this conclusion.

More than anything else, Kenny is what is wrong with this team.

If you look at Kenny's statistics, they are pretty impressive, and none more so 
than his assist to turnover ratio, which currently sits at around 5:1, and which is
 probably even higher over the last few months.  In a recent game, Kenny had 
six assists and no turnovers, which was hailed by some observers as a bright
 spot in an otherwise dismal loss.  This is a mistake.  As no less an authority than
 Bob Cousy (in Cousy on the Celtic Mystique) says, a good point guard should
 turn the ball over a few times.  It shows he is trying to make something happen.
 You don't want a 1 to 1 ratio, but you don't want a six to none ratio night in 
and night out, because generally it's indicative of a guy who won't pass unless
 he's absolutely, positively sure that the play is there.  Such a control freak 
will have a superb assist-to-turnover statistic, but generally won't make the 
offense hum, particularly on an uptempo team.  If you pass the ball a lot, guys
 begin to get into the groove of passing, and with all that passing there are 
bound to be some turnovers.  But that is a good thing, because it shows the 
right spirit, and lets guys know that if they give the ball up, they will also get it 
back.  A control freak like Kenny  is constantly turning back from the play 
because he sees it might not work out, and retreating to the dribble drive from
 the top of the key, which is his own comfort zone.  Rick was right to trade 
Chauncey for Kenny -- I will never, ever hold that trade against him -- but 
Kenny has more than a little Billups inside of him, despite his much greater 
virtuosity with the ball.  That's why it's so frustrating to see Kenny being so 
overly meticulous.  He is the guy that should be getting the passing mood 
starting and instead he is projecting his anal tendencies on the team as a whole.  

Furthermore, I am convinced that it is Kenny's defensive weakness that keeps
 us from pressing all the time.  Vitaly probably isn't cut out for the press, but we
 are paying Tony Battie 24 million dollars, are we not?  Antoine obviously is 
highly capable of pressing, and in fact is better there than man to man.  But 
the press requires a really aggressive defensive point guard, and Kenny is not
 that man.  Plus, he is far too brittle to take the physical beating such play 
requires.  I would trade him for Greg Anthony in an instant.  

Coaching:

This is the hardest one to figure.  Since when can Rick Pitino not coach?  But many
 wizened observers think he has been outcoached many times this year.  His 
substitution patterns are undeniably erratic.  He makes a jerk of himself by yelling
 all the time.  The team mails in crucial games, and gives up big leads, and yet he
 doesn't seem to respond at all.  (Why can't he just instruct them to keep 
running?  How I hate watching Kenny walk the ball up the floor.)  Furthermore,
 it really does seem that Pitino is arbitrary with his favoritism.  Why is Walter
 McCarty played so frequently, and Danny Fortson, the only tough non-
Ukrainian on a downy-soft team like this, hardly played at all.  (The less said 
about Fortson's aborted trade to Toronto, the better.)  I don't have the answers
 for any of these questions, though Pitino seems fairly adamantine that he is in
 the right.  He says that they're young, but they are two years older than the
 hustling, never-say-die team of 1998.  Go figure.  

The bottom line is that the Pitino Project has come to a dead halt.  Fans are 
angry at him and the expected magic has not come to light at all.  I personally 
think Kenny has far more to do with this than anybody thinks, and that his 
superficially fine play has hoodwinked everybody, but there are none 
righteous, not one.  From 1987 until today we have all thought that the 
Celtics were on their way back to the promised land.  (Even in the Carr 
era the promotional slogan was "This train is bound for glory.")  Now we're 
not so sure.  We are not surprised to see the Celtics lose.  That's a bad thing.
But it's good for all of us mentally.  

Despair is our friend.
Joshua Ozersky
Marketing Communications
Environmental Products Division
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