The Celtics are becoming irrelevant

[wayray@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

(Ainge correctly saw that the Celtics were Queens of the JV League
and rightly torched the team. Frankly, the Celtics back under O'Brien
weren't all that relevant to begin with, as the Boston Sports Fans and 
Media concentrated their main attention on the Red Sox and Patriots.
A more accurate title for this article would be: "The Celtics are becoming
more irrelevant".)


Shades of 1997
The Celtics are becoming irrelevant
BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG 
Boston Phoenix
	
How can it be? How is it that the Boston Celtics have managed to fall from the top of the city's sports franchises to its most immaterial? How did a team that finally seemed to be working its way up in the National Basketball Association  after a 17-year drought and seven years removed from a 15-67 campaign  manage to backtrack so quickly and so dramatically that its third straight playoff appearance is seriously in doubt? What happened to this proud organization while all of New England was watching the once-forlorn Patriots supplant the Auerbachians as the standard-bearer for championship teams?
Now that confetti from the 2003-'04 Patriots' Super Bowl parade has been swept up, nothing remains to hide the fact that Boston's basketball team is 23-29 in a wildly mediocre conference, and has won just 11 of 28 games at home. Both the Celts and their FleetCenter co-tenants, the Bruins, were admittedly struggling during December when Patriots Fever was taking hold, but no one other than the teams' owners and season-ticket holders was overly concerned. The Bruins, though, have turned things around, and are 13 games above .500, in second place in the ultra-competitive Northeast Division of the NHL. Talk about turning over a new leaf: once the calendar flipped to 2004, the B's went on a rampage, going 13-3-2 since a lackluster 3-0 home loss to Ottawa on December 30. Not only are the Black & Gold playing well, but the All-Star break and the lengthy road trip necessitated by the Monsters, Inc. ice show at the FleetCenter are seen as inconvenient distractions for a team that has won five straight.
The Celtics are the polar opposite of those guys. Before Saturday's impressive road win over an injury-decimated Philadelphia team, the Green had lost six straight under interim coach John Carroll. How did it get to a point where this unfocused team is plummeting so quickly under the watch of an interim coach  just 21 months after reaching the conference finals?
Where do we begin? I guess if you want to skim over the M.L. Carr and Rick Pitino eras and move straight to the Jim O'Brien period, you can see that great strides were being made at one point. Then the team floundered under Pitino, who resigned in January of 2001. O'Brien, Pitino's loyal assistant during his tenure with the NCAA Wildcats and the NBA Knicks, became interim coach. After taking that 12-22 Boston team and leading it to a .500 record the rest of the way, O'Brien got to keep the gig and continued to restore the team to its former prominence. The following year's team went 49-33 and surprised Detroit en route to the Eastern Finals before succumbing in six exciting games to the New Jersey Nets. Unfortunately, the team failed to build upon that reincarnation, and former owner Paul Gaston refused to open his wallet to re-sign critical members of the 2002 squad. Poor drafting also did not help matters. The team again made the playoffs the subsequent season with a 44-38 mark, but the Celts were believed to have overachieved and over-relied on their two marquee players, Antoine Walker and Paul Pierce, in spite of the team's upset of Indiana in the first round.
This is where the team's fortunes underwent a critical change  unfortunately, for the worse. Nine months earlier, an investment group led by venture capitalist Wyc Grousbeck had bought the Celtics for $360 million from the tightwad Gaston, and the local ownership pledged to support the team and return it to its former glory. Yet the franchise had been saddled with the bloated contract of the aging Vin Baker, who was still owed $50 million over four seasons. When added to the maxed-out deals given to Pierce and Walker, that left little money for the supporting players. Ownership took the odd step of hiring former Celtic Danny Ainge as executive director of basketball operations and announcing it prior to game three of the playoff semifinal series with the Nets, thereby distracting a team that was already overmatched and in the process of being eliminated in a 4-0 sweep. Ainge, a member of three championship Celtics teams in the '80s, came on board with a good reputation as a coach and TV analyst, and his place in Boston hoops history had already been established despite the fact that he was widely remembered as a bit of a whiner by opponents.
Ainge got the chance to put his money (as a Celts exec) where his mouth was (as a TNT color analyst) and keep the team competitive while supposedly taking it to the next level  a plane presumed to include an appearance in the NBA Finals. Initially, Ainge proclaimed (to the Boston Globe) that he "had no intention of trading Antoine Walker" and would "never make a phone call in that regard." However, it would appear that he either took a lot of incoming calls or broke his word, because the controversial forward was sent packing to Big D in a five-player deal on the eve of the season opener last October. The trade elicited a lot of debate among the Celtics faithful, but realistically the team could not have afforded another maximum deal for Walker and still hope to build more of a team concept. No one worried about the fact that Antoine was Pierce's best friend on the squad, or that Pierce would now be on his own as far as offensive weaponry went. Whether then-coach O'Brien really went along with that deal has never come out, but he and Walker had been close. But if O'Brien really did have any reservations about losing his All-Star forward, he kept them largely to himself.
He did not do the same, however, when it came to Ainge's next blockbuster deal: sending Eric Williams, Tony Battie, and Kedrick Brown to the lowly Cavaliers for Chris Mihm, Michael Stewart, and troublemaker Ricky Davis. Williams was widely viewed as the heart and soul of the Celtics, and the battle-tested Battie had often played hurt for the good of the team. The fact that the trade was announced in the midst of a five-game win streak, moreover, did not sit well with anybody. O'Brien in particular was devastated at the loss of two quality players and a pair of character players, for whom he received one of the NBA's most prolific villains in return. When the dust had cleared, only Pierce, Walter McCarty, and Baker remained from the 2002-'03 opening-night roster. Some of the players acquired in the two deals may actually turn out to be pretty decent (Jiri Welsch seems a bona fide up-and-comer, and Raef LaFrentz and Mihm could continue to develop), but the Celtics organization did not appear to be helping itself as far as future salary-cap ramifications went. And the team's chemistry had been decimated.
O'Brien always focused on defense. By trading the defensively talented Williams and Battie and for the offense-only-minded Davis, Ainge had made it obvious that he wanted to create a high-scoring and entertaining team, which went against everything the coach stood for. And that is why, four months after receiving a coveted two-year contract extension, O'Brien stood up for his principles on January 28 and did the wise thing for himself (if not the organization): he stepped down, leaving the downwardly spiraling team in the hands of the novice Carroll.
How bad has it gotten recently? During the course of the six-game losing streak that marked the beginning of the Carroll residency, the Celts lost to New York (25-27), Atlanta (17-35), and the LA Clippers (22-27)  three teams that could never have touched the former Green team  and even worse, all three debacles were at home. (On Monday, Boston managed to lose at 19-32 Cleveland, a team that had lost 13 straight to the Celtics but has been on the upswing ever since the deal that brought Williams, Battie, and Brown to town.) The loss that kicked off that six-game stumble was a 19-point defeat at New Jersey, a squad that also had its share of difficulties before it too changed head coaches. The difference is that Lawrence Franks has led the first-place Nets to seven straight victories since taking over, while Carroll's team has shown only intermittent competitiveness during its recent 1-7 period.
It was obvious that O'Brien had made some headway in harnessing Davis's me-first attitude, but whether that will hold during the rest of this lost season remains to be seen. And speaking of lost, nobody looks more downtrodden on the court than Pierce, who is for the most part playing out the 2004 string with an odd assortment of strangers (even Baker is now on a team-imposed suspension related to his alcohol-treatment program), and his resigned attitude seems obvious in spite of his comments to the contrary. Carroll is doing the best he can, but he was caught off-guard and was ill-prepared for the situation left at his doorstep. Management appears to support Ainge and the direction in which he is taking the team, but it too seems focused on the bottom line and the future rather than the lost chemistry, the patchwork, underperforming team, and the dissatisfied and restless patrons who are wondering why they are paying top dollar to see such a moribund outfit. Ainge, to his credit, has not hidden from the spotlight. But the long-range goals that he envisions through his rose-colored glasses are not what the fandom wants on the heels of two straight playoff years and a ticket-price increase.
Sure, the team still talks in terms of the upcoming post-season, but allow me to stifle a laugh. Who in their right mind believes that a 23-29 team even deserves to make the playoffs, and what kind of damage could it possibly do with the roster that it has? Baker seems gone for the season (if not the balance of his Celtics career), LaFrentz is on the shelf after knee surgery (a procedure that was also against O'Brien's wishes), and Pierce is left on his own while the defensive systems that the former coach implemented fade from view.
Sure, Boston would qualify (albeit as the eighth seed) for the Eastern playoffs if they began today, but that's only because the overall conference is so second-rate. Throw the Celts into the Western Conference, and they would be dead last in an eight-team Midwest Division and in fifth place (14 games back) in the Pacific. That's a playoff team?
The Patriots are on top of the football world. The Red Sox will enter the 2004 season as legitimate favorites to win the whole thing. The Bruins are making an active push to the post-season, and as one of the hottest teams in the NHL right now, they could even advance to the conference semis or finals.
The Celtics, meanwhile, are jogging up and down the court of an arena near you just anxious to get the damn season over with despite the fact that there are 30 full games left to play before the playoffs (ahem) begin.
Danny Ainge's vision remains intact. But he's under siege from far and wide, and is probably beginning to understand why Larry Bird never wanted to risk tarnishing his image by taking over a team in the town where he was once regarded as a god.
Ainge was never a Boston god, nor even a demi- or semi-god. And right now he's viewed not as that three-time Celtic champion, but as the guy who screwed things up just when they were beginning to improve.
"Sporting Eye" runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung@xxxxxxx