Hoopsworld Season Preview

["Josh O." <igtcjosh@xxxxxxxxx>]

During the off-season, when there's nothing better to
do, I make a hobby of collecting the basketball
preview magazines. Boy, are they bad! But as a measure
of the conventional thinking, they can't be beat. This
is received wisdom, double-distilled, with an almost
comic unwillingness to go out on a limb. (I sometimes
wish I could give these magazines a Turing test, to
see if they are written by computers; I often hear
them in my mind read aloud by Stephen Hawking's voice
generator.) Some nimrod sits at a cubicle, with a stat
sheet and last year's magazine, and writes these
according to a familiar formula. The Celtics deserve
better. 

This year's Celtics preview, in nearly all of these
preview magaziens, goes something like this:

The Celtics will go as far as their dynamic duo of
Paul Pierce and Antoine Walker take them, but they
start the 2002 season full of question marks. Can they
repeat last year's improbable ride to the Eastern
Finals? Fears of the luxury tax forced them to deal
away Kenny Anderson, leaving a gaping hole at point
guard, and marksman Rodney Rogers, a key to last
year's playoff run, signed with New Jersey as a free
agent. The Celtics better hope that new acquisition
Vin Baker will return to his all-star form.
Prediction: fourth in Atlantic.

Even some fans believe this. But I am here to tell you
it isn't true. Here is my exclusive HOOPSWORLD
preview, now that the team has been sold, the cast
assembled, and exhibitions underway. 

THE 2002 Boston Celtics are a team on the rise. But
they will go only as far as their all-star forwards
can take them...just kidding. Actually, the Celtics
are a team on the rise, but they're more than just
that. They are comers, legitimate contenders to the
NBA throne which will be vacant when the Lakers fall,
as they eventually must. It may be asking too much to
hope that we be the ones to dethrone them; more
likely, the conqueror worm will do the job, and Kobe
or Shaq will either quit or move elsewhere. But in
either case, the Celtics are now poised to step into
the elite company of the NBA. For all the talk about
the loss of Anderson and Rogers, they have made huge
upgrades, and in fact I believe this might have been
their most productive offseason, excluding the year
they drafted Pierce, in memory.

Think about it. When was the last time a good Celtics
team added an established, healthy pivot player with a
betting chance to be an all-star? 1981, that's when.
The team has been operating with makeshifts since
Robert Parish left ten years ago. Two fundamentally
sound strongmen have spent long periods on the roster,
in Eric Montross and Vitaly Potapenko, but neither had
a coach willing or able to run an offense through
them; Baker would have been a huge upgrade on either.
Let's say he stays as he mediocre was in Seattle: he's
still going to give you 14 and 6, and a legitimate
threat down low (49% last year.) I don't know about
you, but all I can remember hearing, from every
basketball expert from Larry Bird on down, was that
the Celtics desperately needed a post presence, and
that no team built entirely on perimeter shooting had
ever won an NBA title. Well, now we have a low-post
presence, and one who, when motivated, can score and
rebound against even the likes of Tim Duncan and
Rasheed Wallace (two players whom Baker has played
well when with Seattle.)

And, really, who is Baker replacing? While it was
infuriating to see a good player get away to a
division rival, Rodney Rogers was primarily a
long-range set shooter, when all is said and done. He
was strong and athletic, and played hard, and could
even score some points down low if he happened to get
a mismatch. But the fact is, the main thing he did for
us was to stand on the perimeter and knock down shots.
We needed him badly last year, because that team was
fatally flawed by its reliance on defensive players in
an offense predicated on three-point shooting. This is
an old con in the NBA, a way for defensive specialists
to score some points. But Michael Cooper, Dennis
Rodman, Bruce Bowen, and the other nonscorers who have
done it had low-post luxuries the Celtics didn't.
Worse still, all that standstill shooting took away
from the few offensive strengths the players did have.
Erick Strickland is only going to do you any good
barrelling to the hoop; Eric Williams should be giving
you quick spin moves into the lane. Walter ought to be
getting weak-side offensive rebounds, and dunks on the
break. And as for the other players, the less said the
better: Kenny Anderson, Tony Battie, Vitaly Potapenko,
and Kedrick Brown took 62 shots combined, making 14 of
them. Eeek. Brown was especially misused: a live wire
with sky-high athleticism, he was asked to stand by
himself 23 feet from the basket, as paralysed as
Christopher Reeve. What a waste! Rodney Rogers made
this a fifty win team just by being a dependable
natural shooter. Now he's gone, and Bruno Sundov and
Ruben Wolkowysky, can fill his role well enough. But
they won't need to, because now the offense has been
diversified, and the guards can actually shoot. Which
brings up our other supposedly "devastating" loss.

Kenny Anderson was an offensive liability. Period. He
deserves a lot of credit, I admit. He played pretty
well last year, got with the program, gave us smart,
quick-handed defense, and set up shooters for
mid-range jump shots. But thats all he did. Correct
me if Im wrong, but all I think weve lost by trading
him is a point guard who couldn't penetrate against
good defenders, who couldn't run a fast break, and who
couldn't be depended upon to hit the open 14-footers
upon whom the whole offense depended. Am I wrong? As
much as any one player, he was responsible for our
loss to the Nets in the conference finals. There are
other reasons, such as the lack of an enforcer to keep
candy-assed players like Kerry Kittles out of the
lane, and the brilliant play of Jason Kidd; but Paul
and Antoine broke down because they were carrying the
whole offense. And that wont happen this year. As we
head into the new season, we have legit shooters at
nearly every position, including two guys pencilled in
at the point who are long-range specialists. And Tony
Delk is even better from mid-range than he is from
beyond the arc. That fact just might prove useful this
year. 

The Celtics finally seem to have the complete roster
they have been needing to play Jim OBriens strange
brand of basketball. Holes have been filled, and
upgrades made at every position. Even team rebounding,
which was a major weakness, should be shored up, if
O'Brien has the sense to start Vin Baker and Tony
Battie at the same time, at least for stretches, and
unleashes Kedrick Brown's athleticism on the offensive
boards. And for all the talk about the Nets'
improvements, we are still the only team in the
conference with two players who demand a double team
on every possession. And now we have added a
legitimate low-post threat as well. Can you smell what
the Celtics are cooking now? 

The only major question I have, going in to the
pre-season, is whether the team can finally start to
run. Last year, our veteran "natural" point guard
seemed to keep the ball himself on eight out of every
nine breaks he ran; and threw the ball away on the
other one. I can't ever remember seeing a team blow
more opportunities than the Celtics did last year. It
didn't matter what the numbers were: two-on-one,
three-on-one, three-on-two. We never got an easy shot.
And the offense wasnt any easier. Paul and Antoine
played a two man offense so grindingly mechanical that
when, in the final Detroit game, they ran a clean give
and go it was hailed as some kind of brainstorm. You
have to love how up-front O'Brien was last week when
asked why the Celtics couldn't break: "we never
practiced it," he said simply. Reports from training
camp are that they've started to run break drills, at
long last. 

So that's the offense. But what about the defense? The
Celtics get a lot of mileage from their team chemistry
and hustle; they swarm to the ball, and have some good
on-the-ball defenders in Delk, Pierce, Brown,
Williams, and McCarty (a demon against smaller
players). And they have a very quick lateral defender
in Tony Battie who can give a lot of help fast. But
they lost most of their toughness, and all of their
muscle, when Rodney Rogers, Vitaly Potapenko, and
Erick Strickland left. One of the reasons the Celtics
were able to consistently beat more talented teams,
particularly western teams, was the hard-assed,
physical, eastern-conference style of play they
brought. Everyone is ready to defend Pierce and
Walker. Good luck. But few teams thought of the
Celtics, I suspect, as a thuggish crew, from whom they
would take a beating on defense if they wanted to win.


The combination of petal-to-the-metal star power on
offense, and rough and selfless defense, got them far.
Now the offense will be better; but the defense will,
I think, be softer. Whether the signal upgrade on
offense offsets the lack of toughness, we will have to
see. It remains indisputably true that the Nets
improved themselves by adding Mutumbo and Rogers, and
by giving the minutes formerly wasted on Keith Van
Horn to the more deserving Richard Jefferson. But when
all is said and done, the Celtics have addressed the
main things that kept them from beating the Nets,
while the Nets have only made changes around the
edges. Admittedly, they are a different team
defensively, but not in a way that will hurt the
Celtics, who ate Mutumbo up last year, even with their
offense riding on the rims. Philadelphia will be much
worse; and while Orlando and Milwaukee look to be much
improved, neither is a very good defensive team. That
leaves the Celtics as the best team in the East. The
Kings, Spurs, and Lakers are all better, for now; but
the Celtics are still ascending, and the top of their
trajectory is still hidden from our sight.

2002-2003 prediction: 52 wins, NBA finals.
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