Reynolds: Woeful Celtics Must Be Held Accountable

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Providence Journal
Bill Reynolds: Woeful Celts must be held accountable 
01:00 AM EST on Thursday, February 19, 2004 
The Celtics are out west.
Maybe they should stay there.
There's little question this Celtics season is now over. Never mind that they're mathematically still in the playoff chase, or that this season still has 27 games to go. That's just a mirage, the reality of the schedule, games the team is contracted to play. In all actuality, this season is over, the next two months little more than garbage time, a cruise to nowhere.
Call it Dead Team Walking.
And it's more than the fact the Celtics have lost nine of their last 10 games, have become as bad as any team in the NBA. It's the fact that in their last two games, they haven't even competed, a portrait of the matador defense. Tueday night in Sacramento, they were the perfect foils to the Kings, who toyed with the Celtics like a cat with a mouse. Whatever shot the Kings wanted, they got. And this was without Chris Webber and Brad Miller in the lineup.
Even that, though, was a marked improvement over a week ago, when the Celtics were down 30 to the Bulls. Not the Kings. Not the Pacers. Not the Lakers with Shaq and Kobe. Not the old Celtics with Bird and McHale. Not Michael Jordan's Bulls. These Bulls. As in pathetic, below-.500, going-nowhere Bulls.
That's all you need to know. Because it simply means this Celtics team has abdicated, lost any desire to play defense, is now beginning to look startingly reminiscent of M.L. Carr's sorry last year in '97, the one in which the Celtics won only 15 games all year and were barely competitive.
In retrospect, this season ended on Jan. 27, even if no one bothered to tell us. That was the day Jim O'Brien said he'd had enough, walking away from two years left on his contract. If there was any lingering doubt this had become Danny Ainge's team, that obliterated it.
So what's going on here?
How did a team go from being in the playoffs last year to now losing nine of 10 games and showing all the intensity of an old dog lying in the afternoon sun?
Let's go back to the beginning.
Ainge's assertion that last year's Celtics had gone as far as they could is tough to argue against. He believed the team needed to be more athletic, younger, with more salary-cap maneuverability. So he traded Antoine Walker, in a controversial move, and then just when the smoke cleared, he fired another volley, essentially dealing Eric Williams and Tony Battie for Ricky Davis and Chris Mihm.
Goodbye team that went to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2002.
Hello darkness, my old friend.
Because this is becoming depressingly reminiscent of Carr's last year, the nadir of the Celtics as we've come to know them, that time when the glory days seemed so far away you almost needed ESPN Classic to remember them.
It also appears to be becoming Ainge's public nightmare, for he's on record as saying when he made the Walker trade that even the rebuilt Celtics would make the playoffs, be as good as last year's team that went to the second round. In Ainge's defense, that was before Raef LaFrentz, the prize in the Walker deal, went out for the year with an injury.
But no one cares about that.
Not now.
Not in a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world. No one wants to hear about rebuilding. No one wants to hear about two or three years from now. Patience is a dirty word. Especially in a town that's seen two playoff appearances in nine years, and now sees the most storied franchise in the sport down 30 to the Bulls.
This is the precipice Ainge now finds himself perched on, less than a year after he first got the job. It's one thing to say last year's Celtics had gone as far as they could go. It's another to be down 30 to the Bulls. It's one thing to say that maybe you have to take a step backward to move forward. It's another to have virtually stopped competing.
O'Brien made the Celtics play defense, made them compete. But that stopped as soon as he left, as one of the NBA truisms is that players rarely play for interim coaches. So now John Carroll inherits a group of players that not only seems leaderless, but also on the verge of packing it in for the season. He deserves a better fate.
Regardless, Ainge must do something to get this team to extend a better effort. For it's one thing to write off the year and re-tool for the future, but Ainge can't let this continue. He must do something. Whether that's by hiring a new coach, coaching the team himself, or finding a way to make players accountable. Something.
That's the work for the rest of this season. It's one thing to lose, another to go through the motions. One thing to lose, another to be down 30 to the Bulls. One thing to lose, another to emotionally pack it in.
Until then?
They can stay out west.