Alright, I hate to be the one to throw cold water all over your dreams, but someone’s got to do it. Here goes: The Celtics will not win a championship this season. Not one for the Eastern Conference, and certainly not the whole damn thing.
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.
Last July I mocked my crazy friend Neal in a column for suggesting that Danny Ainge would be interested in re-acquiring Antoine Walker. Last Thursday Neal called me and instructed me to promptly give him “mad props.” Here, I’m doing it, but I just have to say that in Neal’s five or so years as an imaginary NBA general manager, he has traded every player in the league at least twice. Poor guys like Jason Williams, Mark Blount and Brent Barry have been moved so much in his bizarro world that none of them have any idea where they were originally born. Not that Neal has any idea where he is most of the time, either, but that’s an issue for the good people at the Betty Ford Clinic, not me.
Back at the ranch, my point is that Walker’s return to the Fleet or the Golden Palace or, god forbid, the Derek Jeter center, was simply the most ridiculous concept one could ever dream up. Until it happened, that is.
Few things that happen in the NBA surprise me. When Gary Payton was first traded to the Celtics in the off-season, I knew exactly why the move was made. When Vince Carter was traded to the Nets for next to nothing, I disagreed, but understood the thinking of the Toronto brass. When Chris Webber was traded to the Sixers for three overpaid power forwards, I believed that the Kings could have gotten more for the man who made Sacramento a basketball power, but the reasoning for the trade was clear to me.
When I found out that Antoine Walker had been traded back to the Celtics my jaw dropped and I’m still trying to figure out exactly how and why it happened.
When evaluating the play of the Boston Celtics at the All-Star break, it’s important to recall what Danny Ainge told us to expect from this year’s club following the disastrous 2003-04 campaign: Ainge said that this season the team would be better than last, but they were still at least a couple years away from competing for the Eastern Conference crown.
Someone go put Tommy Heinsohn under a 24-hour watch. From now on, Heinsohn won’t be able to declare his love for Waltah unless Tommy changes his allegiances from Celtics’ green to Suns’ purple and orange.
Yes, today Walter McCarty was finally traded to Phoenix for a future second-round pick. The deal has been in the works for at least a couple weeks as the Suns initially balked at taking McCarty because they were weary of the versatile forwards’ player option for next season. It appears that the Celtics were able to soothe the Suns’ fears by adding an undisclosed amount of cash to the deal.
So what’s wrong with the Celtics?
After all the questions this past off-season about how this team of assorted parts would play, half the season is now over and what we have is a two game below .500 club. Is this what we should expect from them for the rest of the season?
A very sobering thought occurred to me on the day following the dismantling of the modern day steel curtain in Pittsburgh. I was trash-talking my friend Nate, a Philadelphia native, who was telling me all of the different reasons that the Eagles will have a chance to dethrone the Pats in Jacksonville in Super Bowl XXXIX. I sat there, patiently listening to his arguments, and then responded to him, “Yeah, but the Patriots will still win.”
At this very moment, a harsh reality hit me: I had become a Yankee fan.
It is absolutely the most preposterous idea I could ever suggest. It almost hurts me to put a thought like this into print because such an action by itself can give this ridiculousness some credibility. It’s possible that if I just ignore it, everyone will eventually forget there were ever any rumors about Antoine Walker being traded back to the Boston Celtics.
But therein lies the problem. I can’t ignore this because every time I think it’s blown over it just keeps coming back, like a bad dream. Not a bad analogy in this case, by the way.
Gather `round the fire, kids, it’s time for a story. About eight years ago I was studying abroad when a friend of mine, Ben Insel, told me rather nonchalantly that he was going to kick his nasty smoking habit. Given how hard quitting is, especially with the inherent pressures in a culture that worships tobacco, I didn’t believe Ben for a second. Later, when talking to some friends about some of the Americans in school who had taken up smoking during the year I listed Ben, to which my friends said “Ben quit.” For the next month I never saw a cigarette in Ben’s mouth and eventually began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, I had underestimated the strength of my friend’s will. Of course the second that happened I walked outside and saw Ben hanging out with the Marlboro Man.