| That 70s Show: Shining Light On The Most Underappreciated Team Authored by Elrod Enchilada - August 7, 2008 - 5:52 pm
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The teams that qualify are pretty obvious: the Celtics in the 60s; the Celtics in the 80s; the Lakers in the 80s; the Lakers in the 00s; the Bulls in the 90s; and the Spurs in the 00s.
These six teams are considered the great dynasty teams in NBA history. They stand far above the rest.
But one more team qualifies for the list. Who could it be? The vaunted Knicks team of the early 70s that occupies a hallowed spot in NBA history? Or maybe the Bad Boy Pistons of the late 80s, another team often ranked with the greats? Or possibly the Olajuwon-led Houston Rockets of the 90s, the only team capable of interrupting the Jordan era?
No, none of these great multiple-championship winning teams qualifies. The Pistons come closest, averaging just over 55 wins from 1987-91, but the other two are well below that.
The answer, as you may have guessed by now, is none other than the Boston Celtics, circa 1972-76. This team, coached by Tommy Heinsohn and built around Dave Cowens, John Havlicek, JoJo White, Don Chaney, Don Nelson and Paul Silas, dominated the NBA in the early and middle 1970s, winning the NBA title in 1974 and 1976, and only injuries prevented it from winning a near-certain third during these years. Incompetent and idiotic ownership and one of the more regrettable trades in Red Auerbach's storied career may have cut the team's greatness off two or three years prematurely.
Had that team played in any other city except Boston or LA, it would be remembered as it should be, as a tremendous and dominant champion, a team for the ages. Streets would be named for Dave Cowens and JoJo White. Or look at it this way: if the current Garnett-Pierce era of the Cs can match the record of the 70s Celtics by 2012, fans will be delirious with joy. Danny Ainge and Doc Rivers will be considered Gods.
Look at the record:
- 1975-76: 54-28, .659, 1 (0 GB)…won NBA title over Phoenix Suns
- 1974-75: 60-22, .732, 1 (0 GB)…lost ECF in Washington Bullets
- 1973-74: 56-26, .683, 1 (0 GB)…won NBA title in historic 7 game series with Abdul Jabbar-Robertson Bucks
- 1972-73: 68-14, .829, 1 (0 GB)…with Havlicek injured, lost in ECF to eventual champion Knicks in highly controversial series
- 1971-72: 56-26, .683, 1 (0 GB)…lost in ECF to Knicks
Part of the reason the 70s Celtics have been mostly relegated to the margins of NBA history is that the Boston teams that sandwiched them in the 60s and 80s were so spectacular. Those teams, led as they were by Bill Russell and Larry Bird, understandably tower over our consciousnesses. But from 1972 to 1976 these Celtics could play with anyone in any era. The 70s Celtics produced the best season record, 68-14, of any team in franchise history. And they were a far superior team to the last two champions of the Russell era in 1968 and 1969. (Note: The 1969 Russell-coached team is my all-time favorite Celtics team, so I do not write that lightly.)
It was that last Russell-coached champion of 1969 that was supposed to be the end of Celtics dominance of the NBA. All signs pointed to the Celtics becoming just another franchise. After all, the 69 champions barely made the playoffs, won a massive upset victory over the Lakers in the finals, and its rotation included only two players – Nelson and Havlicek -- who would remain productive in the NBA after 1970, when they each turned 30. The Knicks and the Bullets, among others, looked to dominate the East with their rosters brimming with young talent. In the west the Bucks and the Lakers had tremendous teams built around Hall-of Famers. The Celtics were about to join the ranks of the Pistons and the Royals and the Hawks and become just another team.
It was then that Red Auerbach did his finest work as a GM. He did what no other GM in NBA history had done before and what he would do again a decade later: he built a new dynasty for the same franchise around a different superstar and set of players. (Later, Jerry West would do that with the Lakers. No other GM has come close.)
It started with Nelson, and especially Havlicek. Don Nelson was smart and tough complementary forward who could shoot and play solid defense. He played the power forward spot and was smaller than most of the guys he lined up against. By his final season, that last year of the 70s team’s dominance, he was a bench player. His no. 19 has been retired.
Bill Russell once said that John Havlicek sacrificed personal statistics during his first seven years with the Celtics, and as a result he was undervalued by the league, and has continued to be undervalued by basketball historians. In Russ’s mind he was very much the equal of Jerry West, routinely considered one of the three or four best players in the league in the 1960s. Russ also acknowledged that in his mind by 1969 Havlicek had supplanted him as the best player on the Celtics. Evidence to support Russ’s claim came immediately after Russ’s 1969 retirement when Hondo took team leadership on his shoulders. From 1968-76 Hondo was first or second all-NBA and all-Defense every single year. From 1971-74 Hondo was especially white hot, making first-team all-NBA every year and from 72-75 he finished in the top 10 of MVP voting every year. Boston is the only franchise in the league where John Havlicek could be considered merely the second best small forward in team history. He was that good and the first half of 1970s was his moment in the sun.
But two guys do not a champion make. Indeed, in 1969-70, the first year after Russell’s retirement, the Celtics went 34-48, despite what were arguably career years from Nelson and Havlicek. This is where Red’s greatest GM work came into play:
1. In the 1968 draft, Red took little known defensive specialist Don Chaney, a teammate of Elvin Hayes at Houston, at the end of the first round. The cerebral Chaney became a solid starting 2 guard who made all-defensive team from 1972-75. One cannot help but wonder why Cedric Maxwell’s or Tom Sanders’ number is retired, but Don Chaney’s no. 12 is not.
2. In the 1969 draft, Red shrewdly drafted JoJo White, an All-American from Kansas who was committed to the military and would miss parts of his rookie season as a result, in the middle of the first round. White became a workhorse scoring point guard who twice made all-NBA teams and made seven consecutive all-star games from 1971-77. When the third best player on your team is JoJo White, and he in never mentioned in the same breath as nos. 1 and 2, you have a very very good team.
3. As great at Hondo was, it was not clear he could be the best player on a championship team; or, at the very least, he needed to have someone at least his equal. In the 1970 draft, Red took Dave Cowens with the 4th pick overall and the 70s dynasty was officially born. The Cs were lucky it was such a deep draft because in most years a player of Cowens talent would have gone first or second overall. Cowens was a dominant player his first six years in the league. He finished in the top 4 of MVP voting for four consecutive years. A rebounding lunatic with unmatched intensity, excellent skills and superb athletic ability, the 6-8 Cowens made Kevin Garnett look like Mark Blount on sleeping pills in the passion department. Had his career extended into his early or mid 30s at the same level as his first six years in the league, he would be remembered as one of the 10 or 15 greatest players in NBA history. But for the relevant period of this article – 1972-76 -- Dave Cowens was one of the three or four best players in the NBA, if not the very best. And in most other NBA cities, Dave Cowens would probably be remembered as the greatest player in franchise history. Just not Boston.
4. The 71-72 Celtics won 56 games and went to the Eastern Conference Finals, but the team was still a brick shy of a load. In the 1972 draft, Red took Paul Westphal at the end of the first round. Westphal became a gifted third guard for the Celtics. A tremendous draft choice.
5. But the biggest problem for the Cs in 1972 was the lack of interior defense and rebounding, Cowens was undersized as it was as a 6-8 center, and Nellie was a puny power forward. So Red made a deal. He traded the rights to Charlie Scott, an ABA all-star he had drafted in the bowels of the 1970 draft, to Phoenix for veteran power forward Paul Silas. It was brilliant that Red had drafted Scott in the first place; getting Paul Silas for him was simply the perfect missing piece for the dynasty. Silas played four seasons for the Cs from 72-76. He made all-defense every year and was a leading rebounder. Combined with Cowens he gave the team a ferocity that was unmatched. I confess that Silas is a personal favorite. Like the other core players, he was very smart and very tough. He did all the proverbial “little things” that do not show up in the box score, as well as a lot of very big things, like dominate the boards and play lock down defense. I wish he had played his entire 16 year career in Boston.
So these seven players were the core of the 70s dynasty Celtics. It was a very small team by the standards of the day, and it was a running team. Contemporary Celtics fans know how much Tommy Heinsohn the broadcaster implores the Cs to run; well Tommy Heinsohn the coach got that team in the 1970s. And it also played ferocious defense, with four of its core seven routinely on the all-defense team. It was such a heady team – five of its core players went on to become coaches, and Hondo and White probably could have coached too if they wished to do so -- that the contribution of Tom Heinsohn has probably been underappreciated; but have no doubt, Heinsohn was a tremendous coach. For most fans the only knowledge of this team is the historic triple overtime victory in the 1976 finals. That is a shame, because the 74 finals victory ranks with any championship in Celtics history. And the 73 team was one for the ages. Watching them play was a thing of beauty.
Had the Cs not had moron owners at the time, the dynasty would have certainly extended through the1970s and possibly past the retirement of Havlicek in 1978. In 1975 the owners refused to pay Don Chaney his market rate, and Chaney left for the ABA. Red was not convinced Westphal was ready to be a starter, and Red knew the window was closing on the team’s status as a contender, so he traded Westphal for Charlie Scott. Scott gave the Cs one serviceable season and quickly faded into obscurity. Westphal became one of the two best guards in the NBA for the next five seasons with Phoenix. From 1977-80 he may have been unmatched. Had he stayed in Boston, the late 70s might have been very different.
That wasn’t all. Nellie and Hondo both faded in the mid-70s and Nellie retired after the1976 season. Then Paul Silas became a free agent, and again, the owners refused to pay Silas market rate, so Red traded him in 1976 to Denver for the Mark Blount-like Curtis Rowe. Silas went on to work his magic for the NBA champion Sonics in 1979.
The team assembled in the fall of 1976 was a shell of the dynasty team. The team fell apart as quickly as it had been assembled, with a carelessness that was the exact opposite of the genius Red displayed putting the team together. Dave Cowens took a “leave of absence” for half of the season, and he never returned to previous form, though he was a solid player, making two more all-star games, until he quit four years later in 1980. The 76-77 Cs won but 44 games and then went into the cellar for the next two years.
This lament would be common knowledge for Cs fans had Red not drafted Bird and engineered the trades for Parish and McHale. As it was the late 70s became a blip on the screen rather than the beginning of a long dark age.
The question that remains is why has this magnificent 70s team been neglected? If I had a nickel for every time a Knicks fan waxed about the glory days of Holzman, Reed, DeBusschere and Frazier, or for every time I heard tales of the mighty Bad Boys of Detroit, I could afford to run for U.S. Senate. And the 70s Celtics were better than those teams. Yet if I got a nickel for every time I hear praise for the 70s Celtics I would be lucky to have enough for a slice of pizza and a diet coke.
The main reason, as I stated at the top, is the fact that the team is sandwiched between the two great Celtics dynasty teams of the 60s and the 80s. But there is more to it than that. For starters it is because Cowens’ career faltered at the age of 28 so his career totals do not do justice to how dominant he was from 1972-76. Most Cs fans routinely characterize Kevin McHale as a better player than Dave Cowens. Even Tommy Heinsohn has put it that way. I love McHale, his 86-87 season was one for the ages, and he was one of the best power forwards ever. But the five best seasons of McHale’s career are not more impressive as the five years Cowens had from 72-76. One can only imagine how Cowens would have looked if he had Parish and Bird playing next him.
The other reason given is that because of expansion and the existence of the ABA, any NBA title won during this period requires an asterisk to account for the watered down nature of professional basketball. On the surface, this makes sense. But on closer inspection, it does not hold up. There were many more pro teams in the early 70s than in the early 1960s, but there was also a massive infusion of talent, especially African-American talent, beginning in the late 1960s.
Ironically, I would almost argue that the early to middle 1970s was more of a Golden Age for the NBA than it was a wasteland. The league was ruled by a handful of dominant teams. The dregs of the league may have been unimpressive, but the top teams that squared off in the playoffs were closer to being teams for the ages. In addition to the Celtics, there were: the aforementioned two-time champion Knicks with Reed and Frazier; the 69 game winning Lakers with Wilt and West in their primes; the Bucks with Kareem and Oscar Robertson; the Bullets with Wes Unseld and later Elvin Hayes; the Warriors with Rick Barry and Jamaal Wilkes; and the hugely underrated Bulls with Sloan, Van Lier, Love and Walker. (Except for the 77 and 78 Blazers, the post-merger NBA of the late 70s probably had no teams of this general quality.)
In short, the 70s Celtics were a magnificent team with legendary players who won titles over some impressive and worthy competitors. It was certainly the equal of the early 70s Knicks or the Bad Boy Pistons, and an argument can be made that it was superior to each of them. It was a better team than the Olajuwon Rockets by a wide margin. In my view it was the best team of its era. Its record ranks with the greatest teams in NBA history. It is a team for the ages. We should be so lucky that the current Cs equal their accomplishments. |
