Boston Trade Party
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As posted on - http://mos-basketball.blogspot.com
Just a couple of weeks ago, Paul Pierce was looking for the newest and hottest Playstation or WII games. The captain of the storied Boston Celtics was facing another summer getting to know a bunch of rookies and spending training camp and another NBA season with a roster where Andrew Bynum almost would have been a veteran. And a good captain and team leader like Pierce, well, he tries to spend time with the youngsters and make them have a good time. Today though, he is looking for the best Boston restaurants and spots where you can share a suffisticated talk and a nice glas of wine. Something for some older folks, so to speak...
Not that Paul Pierce doesn't like to play video games (which NBA player doesn't?!), but I'm totally confident that he's much more happy with the situation that now actually presents itself to the Celtics superstar. After a couple of blockbuster trades over the summer, Celtics GM Danny Ainge has finally gotten his superstar a proper supporting cast. Supporting cast might be the wrong word here since the new Celtics Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett are among the absolute NBA elite at their respective positions over the last decade.
By aquiring the two All Stars (in trades where many prospects like Al Jefferson, Gerald Green or draft pick Jeff Green along with a couple of first round picks left Boston), Ainge has clearly led the ship into much more competitive waters. A year ago the Celtics were one of the youngest teams in the entire league and had a handful of promising, young players. Everything looked like Ainge and company would go the rebuilding route (even though they had failed miserably up to that point) yet there has always been Pierce. A hero in Boston, he has sacrificed his body year in year out without any kind of help. No, getting Wally Szczcerbiak or however you spell his name isn't much help. As frustrating as the situation was for Pierce in recent years, the big was the splash his front office made for the soon to be 30 year old small forward this summer. One thing is clear: The Celtics are going for their 17th title. Anything else would be a complete dissapointment and will forever be seen as a bad mark on the career resume of either Pierce, Allen or Garnett... and please also on Ainge's if it happens...
Let's take a closer look at the situation now for Boston.
I'm a big fan of Paul Pierce and always thought that he gets a little underrated because of the horrible teammates he had over the years. Pierce is a warrior who can do it all on the court. He doesn't shy away from big shots, he will defend and work hard and do everything in order for his team to get the W. His numbers over the last two years are just phenomenal: 26.1 points per game, 6.4 rebounds per game and 4.5 assists per game. Read again if you want, this isn't Kobe, Wade or LeBron or any other overhyped superstar we are talking about here, it's Paul Pierce. No. 34 for the Boston Celtics and yes, he's a true superstar in this league. I don't think we need to talk a lot about Kevin Garnett here. He is a great player, he gives the Celtics a presence inside that few teams in the East can counter. Garnett just like Pierce is a workhorse and an absolute basketball fanatic. He is a vocal leader and he was dying for a chance like he faces now in Boston. In my opinion that's the biggest thing Boston gets out of this deal, in Garnett they get a player who is as hungry for a title as Homer Simpson is for a donut. Numbers, stats, individual achievements... Garnett has it all. Now it's time to win something with your team, Big Ticket. The same could be said for sharpshooter Ray Allen. He has always been a brilliant basketball player throughout his career and he is clearly one of the most feared long range shooters of our generation. Yet his teams never really took the next step, despite tremendous leadership and efforts from the former UConn Huskie. Long story short, these three players are just what you call big time players. All of them are easily in the top 20 of the NBA's best players, if not even in the top 15. All of them are known to be model citizens, hard workers and all of them have something left in the tank...
[1] Yet here we come to the big question and the big hope for people in Detroit, Chicago, Miami or wherever a team tries to go for the Eastern Conference crown.
Pierce (29), Allen (32) and Garnett (31) all have a lot of miles on their tires. Don't just look at the age, but these guys have player major minutes throughout their entire career. Garnett even came directly from high school to the Big Dance and he has played an enormous number of minutes over his stellar career. Injuries will happen and even if all of the "Big Three", as people in Boston like to say now, have been pretty durable for most of their basketball life, the risk at their age gets certainly bigger and bigger. Last year, Pierce, KG and RayRay missed a combined 68 games during the regular season. Not only are Celtics fans facing a period of really hoping that the older bones of their stars hold up (Allen for example had his ankles surgically repaired this summer), they also have to see how all these new faces will fit together. I'm positive about since all of them are not only good team players and they are desperate to win now, but also because they are as versatile as it gets. All of them can shoot, penetrate, post up and so on and so on... we could go on and talk about their supporting cast but hell, it has been done in almost every newspaper and every radio station and I don't know where else.
I figured it's stupid to search for negatives about these deals. There are always positives and there are always negatives about any kind of deal or trade. The Celtics made a decision and this decision was to try and go for it now and not in the future with shaky prospects like Gerald Green for example. They not only amassed big names here, they got some of the great players of our generation who really are as good as their names sound. Will they be able to perform at their advanced age?! Will they have a supporting where Kendrick "Big Mouth" Perkins isn't the lone hope alongside Rajon Rondo?!? Ainge decided to go a certain route with his team and this route of not rebuilding but trying everything to win now, well, I can't think of many better ways to do it as with Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce.
Yet only time will tell if the risk the Celtics took by putting all their money on the three kings was justified. The bar is set very high, that's for sure. And there's only one prize to win for these guys. No Eastern Conference Championships, no all star berths of anything. It's all about title 17. Tremendous pressure and almost no margin for error...
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