More on Antoine

[Alexander Wang <awang@MIT.EDU>]

Antoine is an obvious target for the wrath of fans (and pseudo-fans) 
because he is one of the two leaders on this team, he has an ugly game, 
he's obnoxious - the wiggle, complaining to the refs, ill-advised 
statements to the media - plus he makes a lot of money.

It seems there are several arguments.

1. Antoine and Paul are never going to be the core of a championship team. 
However, they are good enough to make the Celtics just mediocre enough to 
never draft highly enough to add another star. Therefore, the team should 
be substantially restructured. Recent examples of similar caliber players 
(statistically productive but not quite All-Stars because their teams don't 
win) include Shareef and Elton Brand being traded for top three picks.

2. Antoine doesn't get it. He's an inefficient scorer, a poor defender, and 
his rebounding and assist stats are actually meaningless. Therefore he 
should be traded, hopefully to some team that is tantalized by his 
potential, for a more traditional position player like Dale Davis. The team 
would win more with this type of player.

3. Antoine is a valuable player whose rebounding and assists do matter, and 
whose offensive inefficiency is at least partially a result of the lack of 
talent on the rest of the team. This is something that Paul M. and I 
believe. Personally I think that Antoine does deserve some criticism 
because there are times where he seems to make boneheaded plays evidently 
because he's "feeling it."

I've thought about the first argument myself quite a bit, mainly because 
Antoine is not a great defender. Personally I feel that the ultimate 
shortcoming of the current team is not on the offensive end. The problem is 
that a combination of Antoine and Battie/Blount/Potapenko (BBP) at the 4/5 
spots is too weak defensively to compete for a championship. Now, if there 
was a solid 5 on this team, would that guy and Antoine be sufficient? I'm 
not sure, but I do think that it's possible to get one through free agency 
in 2003, drafting, or trading players and/or draft picks.

I personally don't believe the second argument, but I do think that there 
are trades out there that could improve the short-term performance of the 
team. Remember the rumored trade of Antoine Walker and Ron Mercer for P.J. 
Brown and Jamal Mashburn back in the Pitino days? Brown is a big upgrade 
over BBP because he's an All-Defensive Team inside player who rebounds 
well. Mashburn is a similar player to Antoine in many respects - big time 
scoring ability but somewhat inefficient, surprisingly good assist 
statistics, inside-outside offensive game, questionable defense. I think 
that team would have been significantly stronger defensively than what we 
played the last few years, and possibly made the playoffs as a low seed.

I believe the third argument though, because I think even the people who 
like arguments 1 and 2 agree that the rest of the team basically sucks (Joe 
Johnson excluded, but we've only had him for 4 games). We're a weak 
rebounding team but why is the finger pointed at Antoine, who leads the 
team and just picked up 17 rebounds, rather than our anemic three-headed 
center? We're weak defensively but is the BBP group strong defenders? I 
remember Pitino kept track of one-on-one defensive stats; Antoine was weak, 
but our centers were giving up a 54% FG. These guys are flat out weak 
defenders. Similarly, Antoine puts up tons of shots and a lot of them are 
bad, but does our offense really get better without him? It's not like he's 
really stealing opportunities from Pierce. I remember the old Pitino 
substitution patterns where Pierce and Walker would both be off the floor 
at the same time, and the rest of the players would pass it around 
hopelessly until the fearless McCarty threw up a shot. Walker can do better 
at finding the open man instead of taking it himself and he can cut down on 
ill-advised shots, but I shudder to imagine the offense if he were replaced 
by Dale Davis.

So my opinion is that we've possibly added a solid third player in Joe 
Johnson, which might take some scoring pressure off of Walker. We're in our 
first full season under (sort of) new management and coaching, and we're 
going to see if they can duplicate or surpass the .500 performance of last 
year. Room under the luxury tax is going to open up in 2003, which could 
allow us to pursue an upgrade at the C position. After four games, I just 
don't see the big emergency that requires us to "pull the plug" on Walker. 
Wait a bit, see how the team looks with Joe Johnson developing and coached 
by O'Brien for a full season or at least until it's clear which way the 
season is heading.

Alex