BSG On The Celtics Latest Collapse

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

Got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues and you know it
don't come easy...
Digital City: Boston - Boston's Sports Guy

      Tuesday, March 28, 2000      


      HTTP://WWW.BOSTONSPORTSGUY.COM -- 1st POSTING, 5:30pm, 3/28

      PARADISE LOST 2: REVELATIONS
      (Notes after the wheels came flying off the Celtics playoff bandwagon once 
      again)


      It's been eight days since I jinxed the Celtics' playoff hopes with my 
      This team is really coming together!" column... and I'm still racked with 
      guilt about the whole thing. My apologies. Thanks to my inexplicable burst 
      of optimism last week, Boston's playoff hopes were submarined by an 
      improbable double whammy -- last-second losses to Minnesota and Philly 
      that drove a Bunker Hill Monument-sized stake into the heart of Gang 
Green.

      Of course, we learned a few things about our team as we sifted through the 
      carnage and sorted through everyone's body parts, and not just that I'm 
      the biggest jinx since Cousin Oliver wreaked havoc on the "Brady Bunch." 
      Since this marks my second post-mortem on the Y2C's in two months, I'm 
      stealing a page from HBO and calling this one Paradise Lost 2: 
      Revelations...

      1. Antoine Walker doesn't like prosperity
      Whenever Employee #8 enjoys a good stretch of games, invariably, his 
      confidence swells and he stops doing the things that worked for him in the 
      first place. As far as cycles go, even menstrual cycles aren't this 
      regular and chaotic. No wonder Coach P looks like he's aged in dog years 
      this season -- his star player is the NBA's answer to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
      Hyde.

       We'll go over this one last time...

      When Walker is playing well, the same things keep happening: he's showing 
      good shot selection and patience on the post, he's seeking out open 
      teammates for jumpers, he's crashing the offensive boards and so on. 

      When Walker is playing poorly, the same things keep happening: he's 
      usually launching bad threes, shooting in the mid 30's (percentage-wise) 
      and not hustling down the court for transition baskets. 

      (Let's just move on before I kill somebody.)

      2. Kenny Anderson is a W-L litmus test
      When Kenny's going against a good point guard -- especially a good 
      defensive point guard -- he inevitably gets creamed and the Celtics 
      usually lose. That's just a fact. Stephon Marbury, Jason Kidd, Sam 
      Cassell, Terrell Brandon and Gary Payton all feasted on Anderson this 
      season -- their teams always seem to succeed against the C's down the 
      stretch because those guys do whatever they want against Kenny. 

      Here's the sad thing: Kenny's been playing hard all year, although his 
      play dropped considerably over the past month (his legs look shot and you 
      wonder if he can make it through 82 games anymore, much less the 
      playoffs). He's just not that good. On certain nights, he carries Boston 
      if he's matched up against the right team (like the Knicks or the Jazz, 
      for instance); on most nights, he's a defensive liability and can't make 
      things happen down the stretch. Which reminds me...

      3. This team plays 4-on-5 offensively down the stretch
      Amazingly, astoundingly, unbelievably... the Celts are shelling out a 
      combined $12 million this season to five small forwards -- McCarty, 
      Williams, Cheaney, Griffin and Minor -- and none of them can consistently 
      make open jumpers. Griffin held the fort during the first part of the year 
      before he sprained his ankle and never fully recovered. Williams and 
      Cheaney have had their moments, but neither of them are reliable offensive 
      players. McCarty's been horrendous all season; you wonder how the CBA 
      playoffs will survive without him. As for Minor, his career probably ended 
      last season when he dislocated his hip.

      So what do you do? If you're Rick Pitino, you juggle these guys (like he's 
      been doing) and hope one of them somehow seizes the 3-spot. Fat chance. 
      The book on this team reads like this:

      * Pressure Anderson and make him work on the defensive end.

      * Double-team Walker, always keep a defender on Pierce and hope the 3-spot 
      guy misses open jumpers down the stretch.

       That's that. The Celts have probably lost a dozen games this year because 
      nobody other than Pierce could make an open jumper. In the Minnesota game 
      -- down by one with 30 seconds left -- Walker reacted to a double-team 
      perfectly and swung the ball to a wide-open Williams in the right corner 
      (in the C's offense, whomever plays the 3-spot is always wide-open in the 
      corner down the stretch because good defensive teams use their 3-defender 
      to double team Walker and Anderson). What happened? Williams air-balled a 
      huge three and almost inadvertently killed one of the ballboys. That's the 
      season in a nutshell.

      4. Western Conference teams OWN the Celts
      They played 16 games against elite Western teams this year and submitted 
      this record: 4-12. Why? For one thing, everything moves faster in the 
      West; because the Celts haven't fully committed to a hectic pace -- the 
      way they did in '97 and the way Orlando did this season -- they can't 
      control the tempo of the game against good, fast teams and usually end up 
      falling apart (like in Phoenix last week).

      Here's the second killer: All the great big forwards reside in the West -- 
      KG, Duncan, C-Webb, Mailman, Rasheed Wallace -- and all of them took turns 
      eating the Celts alive down low, especially on the defensive end (Walker 
      went a combined 38-for-112 against San Antonio, Portland and Minnesota 
      this season).

      5. Any team with a good 1-2 punch at the 2/3 spot owns the Celts
      As much as we love Paul Pierce -- and we do -- at this point in his 
      career, he's a mediocre one-on-one defender. Griffin died in January; they 
      just haven't filed an autopsy report yet. Eric Williams only guards small 
      forwards and does an adequate job at best. Cheaney's the only reliable 
      defender on the team, but he's usually in foul trouble or struggling 
      offensively. That's why teams like Detroit (Stackhouse and Hill), Indiana 
      (Rose and Miller) New York (Houston and Sprewell) and Toronto (Carter and 
      McGrady) have handled Boston all season long.


      ***** ***** ***** ***** *****
      Sift through the wreckage of the five revelations and you'll come across 
      the same theme: Defense. If you're scoring at home, the Celts can't stop 
      good point guards, they can't stop a team with a 1-2 scoring punch at the 
      2/3 spots and they can't stop any of the elite bigger players in the 
      league. Surprisingly, the one position they've handled relatively well has 
      been the center spot -- against the Shaqs, Kemps, Mournings and Ewings of 
      the league -- mainly because Potapenko, Fortson and Battie provide excess 
      muscle, fouls and overall flexibility at those spots.

      During those rare nights when the Celts eke out a win even as they're 
      being tortured defensively -- which is often -- the formula usually 
      includes Walker playing well, Pierce making his jumper and/or Anderson 
      having his way offensively. It becomes an eye-for-an eye scoring 
      contest... and we all know you can't succeed in the NBA that way. You'll 
      always have nights when KG springs for 40 or Cliff Robinson keeps 
      weaseling his way to the foul line. It's inevitable.

      And if this column seems like a notable shift from last week's column... 
      well, it is. Every NBA team enjoys two or three watershed moments per 
      season; for the Celts, it came last week against the T-Wolves and the 
      Sixers, two hard-fought losses in which the Celts played just about as 
      well as they could play. Against Minnesota, they were unable to stop 
      Garnett and Brandon down the stretch and couldn't get anything going 
      offensively once the T-Wolves turned up their defensive intensity; against 
      Philly, they blew two five-point leads in the last 90 seconds of 
      regulation and OT because they couldn't stop Philly from making big plays. 


      With the season on the line, that told you everything you ever needed to 
      know about the Y2C's.


      ***** ***** ***** ***** *****
      So what's left for Boston to accomplish in the last dozen games? A few 
      things...

      * Which version of Employee #8 will show up now that the C's have 
      basically been eliminated -- Dr. Antoine Jekyll or Mr. Walker Hyde? Will 
      #8 start playing selfishly and stupidly again, like he did in Milwaukee on 
      Sunday and in the first half of Friday's Philly game? Will he continue to 
      keep his head up? Is he just toying with us? It sure seems like it.

      * Along those same lines, will these guys quit on Coach P down the stretch 
      or will they continue to play hard for him? The answer could determine 
      whether the Rick-tator sticks around next year or jumps back into the 
      college ranks ("I never wanted to leave Boston, but when you have a chance 
      to lead a program like UCLA...").

      * Can the Celts find a way to give Fortson, Battie and Potapenko playing 
      time without having at least one of them suffer in the process? Why not 
      move Antoine to the 3-spot and give Fortson and Battie the bulk of his 
      minutes at power forward. Could Walker make the move? Could he guard some 
      of the quicker small forwards in the league? Would it change his game 
      offensively too much (by moving him off the low post)?

      * The Celts also need to determine whether they should re-sign Fortson for 
      market value -- probably three years at around $10-$12 million -- when 
      they've already committed $48 million over the next five years to Battie 
      and Potapenko. Danny might suffer an occasional defensive lapse or 20 
      during any given game, but he was put on the planet to grab rebounds, as 
      he showed against the Bucks on Sunday by snaring (a whopping) 17 boards in 
      just 24 minutes. There has to be a place for the Fort on this team 
      somewhere.

      * As for the big picture, we can dwell on every tough loss -- including 
      THREE last-second shots that took away W's, not to mention fourth quarter 
      collapses against the Bulls, Clippers and Mavs -- or we can all accept 
      that this team, : as presently constructed, has a number of faults. Some 
      of those faults are correctable (transition defense, more PT for Fortson, 
      etc.); some will never change (Vitaly's bad hands, Kenny's defense, etc.). 
      If Walker ever rekindles his superior play from earlier this month, Walker 
      and Pierce are good enough and talented enough to make up for many of 
      their teammates' faults. Not all of them, but many of them.

      Unfortunately for us, that's an enormous "if." 

      Will it happen? I'm the wrong person to ask; for whatever reason, my words 
      possess a powerful spell over Antoine Walker's play. As soon as I plant 
      myself in his corner, he starts playing like a putz. As soon as I turn on 
      him, he starts playing like an All-Star. I'm tired of defending him, I'm 
      tired of criticizing him and I'm tired of trying to figure him out. In 
      fact, I'm just plain tired. 

      We can only imagine how Rick Pitino feels.


      


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