| A Dissident Voice: The End Is Not Necessarily Near Authored by Elrod Enchilada - May 23, 2007 - 5:11 pm
Everywhere one turns in Celtics Nation the refrain is the same: Danny must make a deal right now to bring in a veteran. The team must improve dramatically next year and this can only be done by bringing in a vet. At times, this has all the subtlety of a drunken sailor trying to get some action as closing time approaches. Go Danny and trade. Now. Bye-bye no. 5 pick overall and bye-bye Theo’s contract. And probably bye-bye to some of our younger players. And the flip side is others frantically saying it is now time to trade Pierce and blow up the team. Do something, anything, before we kill ourselves.
Halt. Slow down. Take a deep breath my dear Celtic brothers and sisters.
Like Bill Clinton, I feel your pain. I wrote a piece for RealGM last week titled “It is Oden or Durant or Death.” This was our golden opportunity to get the sort of player who could lead us to a decade of 60 win teams, regular contention, and possibly a flag or two or three.
Historically Red always would win the top pick in a case like this. He lucked and/or brilliantly maneuvered his way into Cousy, Russell, Havlicek, Cowens and Bird. Those days are gone. We lost this time. It will be much much more difficult for the C to win a title in the next decade, because champions tend to be led by players who rank among the 3-5 best in the league. (See Duncan, Tim.) Now we don’t have one of those guys, unless Big Al really improves in the next year or two. And we should not expect that to happen, though we can pray.
But let’s put this in perspective. We had a terrible team this year, but that was due to some extent to injuries. Healthy, we would have won 35-42 games, and not had a shot at the top pick.
Last fall, if someone said Big Al will emerge as an all-star caliber 4, Tony Allen would play as an above-average starting 2, and Rajon Rondo would show promise as a high quality starting 1, we would have been delirious. If someone then said that due to injuries we would also end up with the 5th pick overall in a very good draft, we would have been jumping up and down. We would have seen that the Cs would be in the process of accumulating the talent base to have a very good team.
So, yeah, we got the worst possible outcome yesterday. Yes, for the next decade this could stick in our craw like the 97 lottery or Len Bias’s overdose has done. But that will only be the case if the Cs continue to be a bad team for the next decade. And that is by no means certain.
Before the Cs do anything drastic on the trade front, I think two criteria must be met. These should be the Cs iron laws for the visible future.
First, the Cs should make no trade involving the no. 5 pick overall of any of their good young players unless the deal puts the Cs in legitimate contention (55-60 wins) within two seasons. Otherwise, we are simply reliving the fiascos where we lost players like Chauncey Billups, Shawn Marion and Joe Johnson for stiffs like Kenny Anderson, Vitaly Potapenko and Rodney Rogers. These idiotic short-sighted trades produce the outcome of having Peter May run around shouting “Look at us! We’re going to win 43 games! Hurray!” but they stink like month-old fish with the passage of time. Let’s not go down that path again. Patience and wisdom are crucial.
Second, if a trade cannot meet that first criterion, then it can only be made if it does not reduce our chances to become a contender down the road. Let’s not just trade Gerald Green for a veteran for the hell of it. Sure it might help the team develop to have another veteran or two, but let’s not get one at the expense of our talent base down the road. Use the MLE free agent slot to grab a solid guy to bring gravitas to the bench.
I am not opposed to trades, in fact I welcome them, if they meet these criteria. Bring me a prospective deal for Pau Gasol or Jermaine O’Neal and I am all ears. And in those cases, the no. 5 pick is definitely in play.
But let’s imagine we keep a pat hand. Let’s imagine we get Yi or Horford or Brandan Wright with our no. 1 pick. (The one thing we can be certain of, is that Danny will likely make the right call on draft night if we keep the pick.) Let’s imagine we sign Chris Mihm or Jamal Magliore with the MLE free agent slot.
This would be our team:
5—Perkins, Mihm-Magliore…….deep bench: Ratliff
4—Big Al, Horford-Yi-Wright…..deep bench: Powe, Scalabrine
3—Pierce, Szczerbiak, Gomes
2—Tony Allen, Green…..deep bench: Ray
1—Rondo, West
Plus we have the no. 32 pick overall. That should be a talent comparable to a pick in the 20s most years; e.g. West, Allen, Rondo.
That is not a terrible team to put on the floor in my view. It has a lot of depth and flexibility for injuries or if some players blossom while others flounder. So let’s say the 5 play is weak and the no. 1 pick is solid, then Big Al can play more 5. I think it would be a fun team to watch, and it would get better and better over time.
Yes, May 22 is a date that will live in infamy. But this is no time for a Jonestown outcome. Danny and Wyc: stay calm. Let Danny do what he is best at: drafting; and be very careful doing what is far more difficult: trading. |
