Celts must play on Hands tied, Aingelooks For Turnabout

By Steve Bulpett

It will do Celtics [team stats] fans no good to gaze toward the near horizon. The cavalry is not coming over the mountain to save the season.

Twelve games into this short and not-so-sweet season, it appears as though the Celts’ veteran core will be riding to the career corral without much, if any, further assistance.

Team president Danny Ainge didn’t want to discuss transactional possibilities yesterday, but league sources who have dealt with the Celtics confirmed that there is not much the club can do to steer out of this skid.

It is more valuable to the Celtics to let their expiring contracts (Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen) run out rather than deal them for lesser players who would be on the books beyond this season. In theory, it would help to get away from the $16.8 million Paul Pierce [stats] has coming for 2012-13, while he makes $15.3 million this season.

That means the Celts would have to take back roughly that amount in a trade, and how many teams that would need Pierce to make a run now can offer that much back in expiring deals?

So while you might want Ainge to do something immediately to alter the bad basketball you’ve been watching of late, the truth is the club may be better off riding out the storm the rest of this season.

That doesn’t mean Ainge isn’t as disturbed by what he’s seeing as are the team’s followers.

“We’re underachieving,” he said yesterday. “We think we’re a better team than that. I should say I know we’re a better team than that.”

He should say he knows it, but it’s probably more accurate to say he hopes his players have to be better than what they’ve shown in their 4-8 start.

At this stage, instructions are simply not being followed. When coach Doc Rivers requests that his players move the ball more, yet it sticks in hands, when he asks that when an opponent’s shot goes up to put a body on your man before going after the rebound, yet the foes gobble up offensive boards, there is a real problem.

“Sometimes habits are hard to break, and I think every coach goes through that,” said Ainge. “I don’t think it’s different than any other year.

“To me,” he added, cutting to the chase, “those aren’t the issues. The issues are, you know, how good are we? How good can we be? Can we score enough? Can we get enough rebounds? Can we stop the other team enough? I don’t know if we’ve gotten a fair assessment of that yet. The early indication is that the answer to those questions is no, but there have been signs, and so we’ll just give it more time to see.”

He really doesn’t have much of a choice.

And he didn’t really have one this past offseason. Opposing general managers said Ainge was involved in due diligence discussions before and after the lockout, but no one was in a buying mood when it came to the Celts’ high-salaried veterans. Teams believed Garnett and Allen could still help clubs, but nothing they could offer was truly beneficial to the C’s.

So the locals crossed their fingers and hoped for the best. They did, however, have a right to expect that this group would play better and harder as a whole than it has.

“I haven’t enjoyed the season up to this point,” said Ainge when asked if he’s disappointed. “I’ve seen some good things, but I think we’ve underachieved to where we are.”

To make this even a graceful exit, the Celtics [team stats] have to start achieving wins now. Toronto is in town tonight — “the Raptors versus the dinosaurs,” said the Worcester Telegram and Gazette’s Bill Doyle during Monday’s loss to Oklahoma City — Phoenix is here Friday, and the Celts travel to Washington for a Sunday matinee. All three had equal or lesser records than the C’s as of yesterday.

Rivers cautioned that no game can be one his club should win.

“Not really,” he said. “We can’t think about who we’re playing. We’ve just got to win games. We’re going to break through, but we can’t think we’ve got something easy coming up, because we’re not good right now. Every game’s hard for us right now, and it’s going to be hard for a while.

“We’ve just got to hang in there. It’s too early.”

Soon it may be too late.

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For this team the oxymoronic slogan, "It's getting late early really does apply. Like Yogi says about Afflac, " They pay ya' money, which is just as good as cash." (LOL)

MD!