Peter May Attacks The Devil Ainge

[wayray@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

(You'll never win a Pulitzer like the wifey, Peter, with this
sort of verbiage.)

ON BASKETBALL 
Now not best time for Ainge
By Peter May, Globe Staff, 2/5/2004
You get the feeling that Bill Belichick could enter his name in the Massachusetts primary and automatically vault to the top of the list. You get the feeling that if Danny Ainge did the same thing, he'd finish somewhere between Other and Dennis Kucinich. (If all the Celtics owners voted, however, he'd pass Howard Dean.)
	
It's been a rough patch for Our Danny, who, in his haste to build the Celtics team of the future, has put a blowtorch to the team of the present. Already, half of the four people who were supposed to grace the cover of the media guide are gone: Antoine Walker and Jim O'Brien. Judging by what we've read and heard, the fans wouldn't mind if Ainge became the third to exit.
Last night, the Celtics dropped their fifth in a row, a loss that, frankly, should not have happened. They had two days to prepare for the LA Clippers, who had lost seven straight to the Celtics, including six in a row in Boston. But the Celtics wilted in the fourth quarter and lost, 95-86. Interim coach John Carroll cut to the chase, saying he didn't feel his team earned the win.
But don't blame the coach. He isn't a part of Ainge's vision, a vision many of us endorsed in the abstract until we saw the concrete. We agreed with Ainge that it would be nice to have a seriously competitive team before the completion of the Big Dig. But he's going too fast and he's doing it the wrong way with the wrong people. And he's doing it at the expense of a season that, at one time, had a shred of promise (that would be prior to Dec. 15, the day the music died).
When Ainge took the job last spring, he had been away from the Boston sports scene for more than 14 years. Back when he left, the Celtics were revered and respected much like today's Patriots, who, back then, were every bit as irrelevant as today's Celtics. The Celtics had been in a losing battle for people's allegiance, attention, and loyalty for years, until O'Brien made them into a playoff team in 2002 and 2003. And make no mistake, without O'Brien, and his vaporized assistant, Dick Harter, there would have been no magical march to the 2002 conference finals.
Maybe that Celtics team did overachieve, although O'Brien didn't think so. But we do know this: for one, brief moment, the Celtics were part of the Boston sports discourse. People cared about the team. Red Sox players showed up at playoff games, even if owner Paul Gaston elected to play squash instead. WEEI even discovered there was an NBA team in town.
After so many years defined by public opinion flat-lining, or Pitinoesque bombast, that team actually did something that meant something. It then retooled and made the playoffs last year, even if the play bordered on the unwatchable. O'Brien outcoached the overmatched Isiah Thomas in the playoffs, fell behind, 2-0, to the Nets, and then brought his team back to Boston for critical Game 3 -- only to find Ainge and the unenlightened cabal that hired him holding a news conference before the game.
Although we didn't know it then, that was a sign that Ainge was going to be more than just the executive director of basketball operations. He would be omnipresent. You have to wonder how O'Brien really felt trying to coach a game with Ainge sitting in the first row behind the bench. O'Brien will never tell you, but you probably can make an educated guess. The same would hold for watching Ainge instructing players at practice.
Put another way, O'Brien, a man of seemingly limitless patience (he did, after all, put up with the overbearing Pitino for all those years), got so fed up dealing with Ainge that he not only resigned, but left 6 million big ones on the table. You have to really want to leave for that to happen. The new guy, Carroll, is in an impossible position.
And we haven't even gotten to Ricky Davis, who has become, fair or unfair, the symbol for When It All Went Wrong. It's not so much that Ainge traded for Davis, a favorite of the brain doctor (whose typing system apparently precludes playing defense.) It's that Ainge gave up players who had become critical parts of a team that had just started to jell, especially Eric Williams, who was a locker room guy. Ainge thinks that's overrated. But have you noticed what has happened to Cleveland, which had won seven of their last 10 before losing in overtime to the Lakers last night? Have you noticed how many of Paul Pierce's unsightly games have come since the Dec. 15 trade? He was 8 for 20 last night, which qualifies as a good game these days. His shooting percentage (40.2 percent) is at a career low and he had three games in January (out of 16) where he shot 50 percent or better.
But Ainge is more worried about next year and the year after that. The problem is that there are these things called games and these people called fans who come to the FleetCenter hoping the Celtics win. But they're not coming like they used to come; attendance is down more than 1,200 per game. Last night's attendance (14,342) dropped the season average to 16,033. Last year, the team averaged 17,294.
Then again, why should the fans care if Ainge's desk calendar already is on 2005? Ainge lost a coach who had a track record of success and the respect of his players. And if you put Pierce's hand on a Bible, you'd be surprised at what he'd say. Then again, maybe you wouldn't. It simply isn't much fun these days for those who have to live in the here and now.
) Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.