San Antonio is the modern day example of a team that can compete and rebuild at the same time. After winning their first championship in the lockout shortened season in 1999, they filtered out their older talent such as David Robinson, Avery Johnson and Sean Elliot and replaced them with Rasho Nesterovic, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili to surround franchise cornerstone Tim Duncan. When the Spurs won their second ring in 2003, they were calling the season a “rebuilding year.” Of course rebuilding on the fly is easier when you have Duncan roaming the pivot, but in this regard, San Antonio is still the standard to which most NBA teams aspire. Easy as it sounds, there are many risks awaiting a team trying to do the same. Before the ’99-`00 season, the Orlando Magic traded away Penny Hardaway, picked up some overachievers in Bo Outlaw and Darrell Armstrong, and hired an upstart coach in Doc Rivers. Their intention was to feature an up-tempo team while clearing salary cap space to sign at least two premier players the next offseason. The strategy appeared to work perfectly when the Magic missed the playoffs by one game, but garnered wide respect around the league for their unexpected effort. That summer, they signed Tracy McGrady and orchestrated a trade for Grant Hill, confident that they now had the pieces to compete for a title. Of course, Hill’s continued ankle problems derailed that process and McGrady is now Yao Ming’s play pal in Houston.
Another example of the pitfalls of competitive reloading comes out of Indiana. Following the ’99-’00 season, a season in which the Pacers had made it to the finals, longtime center Rik Smits retired, point guard Mark Jackson left, Antonio Davis was traded for Jonathan Bender, Dale Davis was swapped for Jermaine O’Neal, and Jalen Rose was dealt to Chicago for Ron Artest and Brad Miller. On the outside, it appeared that the Pacers had done a phenomenal job at retooling their entire team for the future while maintaining their ability to keep up with some of the elite teams in the NBA. Unfortunately, even the best-laid plans often go astray. The Pacers clearly had the wrong coach in Isiah Thomas, who never made it out of the first round in his three years at the helm against some inferior talent in the postseason. And as gifted as he was, Artest self-destructed enough during the next couple seasons to divert his teammates’ attention from what they were supposed to have been doing: winning.
The lessons from this are clear. When you are able to compete and rebuild at the same time, you can earn the respect of your peers and occasionally some gaudy jewelry as well. But if just a few small pieces of your plan come undone, you can come out looking like a complete moron.
Now let’s come back to 2005 where we find our own Boston Celtics attempting to take their chances and do what the Magic and Pacers never could. If successful, they may be contenders for the next five to ten years. Or, if they’ve misjudged their own talent, they may be in store for some very rough times, indeed.
Since trading for Antoine Walker a week and a half ago, the Celtics now have a veteran at every position and at least one young gun to back each of them up. Think about it. Behind Gary Payton at the point, Delonte West and Marcus Banks are waiting in the wings. After Paul Pierce and Ricky Davis, Tony Allen and Justin Reed are anxious for their opportunity. West also moonlights at the shooting guard position. When Rivers, now the Celtics’ coach, wants to rest Walker, Big Al Jefferson is eager to demonstrate how he averaged 42 points and 18 rebounds in high school, and Kendrick Perkins is just chomping at the bit to move up on the depth chart ahead of Raef LaFrentz and Mark Blount.
What Celtics’ Executive Director of Basketball Operations Danny Ainge (and certainly the ownership) wants though is for this team to make a run at the Eastern Conference Championship. Do they have the horses to do that? Probably not, given Shaq’s arrival in Miami and the difficulty in unseating the champs from Motown, but with Walker, at least they have the ability to make some noise. The C’s no longer seem destined to flame out early in the first round. They finally have a chance, albeit not a good one, to do some damage against the better teams in the East, a list on which they are suddenly, and shockingly, included.
So what could go wrong to stunt their growth? Well, if we’ve learned from the past in the NBA, just about anything. The C’s could decide not to re-sign Payton only to find that neither West nor Banks is ready to run a team. Similarly, Walker, a free agent to-be, could be insulted by the Celtics upcoming offer this summer, at which point the guys in green would return to full-blown rebuilding mode and put to rest all this ridiculous discussion about contending and championships. Injuries could halt any rebuilding project, and there’s always that chance that maybe Jefferson, Allen and West just aren’t as good as we all think they are. God help us all if Rivers goes Isiah on us, by the way.
Frankly, though, you can only control so much, and Ainge has done a remarkable job of taking a used up bunch and putting together the pieces to make something special happen. Can things inexplicably go wrong? Yes, but if you’re not shooting for the moon, what’s the point of coming to work everyday as an NBA general manager? The goal is and has always been (well, at least since 1987) to bring a 17th banner to Boston. If Ainge can do that and make the process more palatable during the waiting period, I don’t think you’ll hear too many complaints.