Antoine

["Berry, Mark S" <berrym@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Knowing Antoine, I'll be surprised if he misses the full two weeks. Let's
hope it's not that long.

Can you imagine where this team would be right now if Bremer hadn't emerged
over the last 10 days? With Delk and Shammond, Antoine was doing so much of
the ball-handling, he really was acting as the point guard. Teams would have
been licking their chops, pressuring the Celtics from the time they stepped
off the bus. Turnovers would have been through the roof.

It's a real indictment of the way the "braintrust" put this team together.
It's still not pretty. I'm guessing we'll still see teams turning up the
pressure on Bremer, knowing he doesn't have Antoine as a safety net against
that pressure. Eric Williams steps in at power forward, because this team
really doesn't have a backup power forward (at least, it didn't until Grant
Long joined the group). The Celtics haven't had a backup power forward for
years, because of this "Antoine will play 40 minutes per game at power
forward" mentality. So now we have Eric Williams, who provides a lot of
intangibles at small forward, but is woefully undersized and a lousy
rebounder at power forward. 

As Kestas said, it's time for Baker and, especially, Kedrick to pick up the
scoring slack. No more excuses for Kedrick. The team needs him to score. The
shots will be there. If he can't do it now, he just can't do it. Let's hope
the faith most of the list has in Kedrick is justified, because things could
get really ugly offensively if it isn't. 

The team can weather the loss of Walker with great defense and unselfish
offense. If it becomes the Paul Pierce show, they'll be in trouble. They
need Pierce to be on his game, but they can't count on him for 40 every
night. 

Mark