| Three-Quarters Full Or Three-Quarters Empty? The Celtics Surreal World Authored by Elrod Enchilada - July 11, 2007 - 7:09 pm
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The optimistic way is to look at the Celtics roster and compare its talent level generically to those of other teams. Specifically, successful NBA teams tend to be successful because they have all-stars that lead them. With the Ray Allen trade the Celtics now have three of the 35 best players in the NBA, by anyone’s reckoning. Allen, Paul Pierce and Big Al Jefferson each rank statistically in the NBA’s top 35 using Hollinger’s PER criteria, for one objective assessment. Likewise, the Celtics’ new Big Three rank in the top 32 of the NBA’s efficiency category.
Generally teams that have three of the top 35 players in the league do extremely well in the NBA. To put it in perspective, the only other NBA teams that can make the same claim are San Antonio and Phoenix, two of the three best teams in the league if not the two very best teams in the league. That is pretty heady company. I have not had time to do a historical assessment, but I am willing to bet that over the past two decades teams that can put three of the top 35 players in the league on the floor tend to win at least 50 games and usually contend for the title.
Pierce is 29 and Ray Allen is coming off the best season in his career. They have been top 35 players their entire careers, often top 15 or top 20 players. Al Jefferson is shooting up the charts. There is every reason to believe these guys will remain in the top 35 for at least one or two more seasons. In the case of Big Al, the only question is exactly how far up the charts he will shoot. He could become a top 10 or top 15 player, and soon.
In this framework, the job for Danny Ainge is clear: get a solid supporting cast that can play defense and fill in the gaps and get on your knees and pray that he gets 70 games each from his Big Three. It is also a moment of reckoning for Doc Rivers. Good coaches win when they start with a Big Three of this caliber. Period. If the Big Three are healthy and the Cs do not win at least 50 games, he has failed as a coach. It is a good sign that Rivers is emphasizing defense. That means he understands what he needs to do to win with these guys.
The pessimistic way to look at the Cs is to assume the position of the other teams in the Atlantic Division or the Eastern Conference more generally. None of the Cs Atlantic Division foes, as far as I can tell, seems especially concerned by the Celtics. Each of them is convinced they will have a better team. Toronto is the returning champ, and chock full of young studs like Bargnani, Bosh and Ford. New Jersey has Kidd, Carter and Richard Jefferson, plus a surrounding cast I suspect they believe is superior to the surrounding cast Danny has put around the Celtics Big Three. Philadelphia was surprisingly strong last year and appears optimistic that its core will remain better than the Cs. And the Knicks, on paper, have some serious talent, albeit at a high price tag. At any rate, each of these teams, when they look at the Atlantic Division, see themselves as finishing ahead of the Celtics, or else the season will be considered a disappointment.
The same logic applies to the entire East. Look at the teams that finished out of the playoffs last year in the East, outside of the Atlantic Division: Atlanta, Milwaukee, Charlotte, and Indiana. I do not think any of them fears the Celtics, based on reading press reports, and I think each of them believes they can have a better team than the Cs. And those are the lottery teams. For any Eastern Conference team that made the playoffs, the Cs are in the rear view mirror and expected to stay there.
And the East is by all accounts woefully poor in comparison to the West.
So looked at this way, the Cs remain a weak team in a weak division in a weak conference. The notion that this is a team that can contend is laughable. Danny Ainge has mortgaged his future mindlessly to get Ray Allen, because he still has a lottery team. And his only choice at this point is to continue to plunge ahead in the same direction making high-risk trades of young players and future no. 1 picks for proven veterans, in the hope of winning now while Pierce and Allen still are in their primes.
Danny’s actions in the next two months will tell us a great deal about which of these two visions he holds for the 07-08 Celtics. |
