Doctor's orders: how the Clippers trade started

mrkleen09 wrote:I dont understand when the Celtics fell into the category of "rebuilding project"

To me, that is a team like the Cavs or the Wizards or the Detroit Pistons.

Next season - if the Celtics get Rondo and Sully back at 100%.  AB and Green come back stronger and more confident.  Jet, Lee come back with a better understanding of the playbook etc.  KG returns to lead the defense. 

Pierce agrees to free up some money and restructure...and they go out and sign a free agent PF (Nikola Pekovic ), and a sniper like Kyle Korver - they are right back in the mix.

MrKleen,

I think you are making an excellent point here.  The perception, with more than a little truth to it, is that our core is old and needs refreshing.  It is natural to take a "a new broom sweeps clean" approach to this and just wipe the deck clear here.  However, we are overlooking the significant issue that we all lived with last season and that is we were ridiculously undermanned due to injuries.  We were the 9th oldest team in the league last year, with a 13 player average of 27-28 years old.  Who were the 8 teams older than us?  NYK, Miami, LAC, LAL, Dallas, Chicago, SAS and Brooklyn.  Chicago was crippled by injuries too but the rest were playoff teams.  As you move down the list and look at the teams younger than us, you see more and more NON-playoff teams.  The moral here?  Old age and trickery will win out over youth and enthusiasm most of the time.   But I already knew that.  http://www.thehardwoodnation.com/2013/02/average-age-of-nba-teams.html  Consider that Rondo, Sully and Barbosa were all on the younger side of 30 years old, with Rondo and Sully being on the younger side of our average, and what does that leave you when you lose them?  The older players, playing heavier minutes, forced to do more.  

I was in NZ and didn't get to watch the playoffs, but I've heard Pierce did not look good.  Consider how he stepped up his rebounding when Sully went down and stepped up his floor generalship when Rondo went down.  No wonder he struggled 2-3 months later, he had been carrying the team all that time.  As a new hole opened up, he changed his game to plug it.  He wasn't a SF, he was a linebacker.  Do we really write a player like that off?  Jeff Green showed us something last year (including his inconsistency) but he didn't become a point forward like Pierce did.  In February, the first full month without Rondo, Sully and Barbosa the Celtics went 8-4, including 2 OT victories (remember the 3OT thriller against Denver?).  Remember how everybody was talking about how the Celtics were better without Rondo, blah, blah, blah?  Whatever happened to those people during the playoffs, anyway?  During that 8-4 run Pierce averaged 7.6rebounds/game and 6.75apg.  His career averages, which include all those years when he was a spry young colt and oh so much better, are 6.3rpg and 4.8apg.  The Captain led.

You have to think that Rondo, Sully and Barbosa wouldn't have positive +/- if they had played (I am NOT a fan of the +/- number for bench players, but you know what I mean.  I'm talking about them having a positive effect on the team's play while they are in) to think that the team we went to war with in the playoffs is the team we are staring at come this November.  I do not consider that to be a reasonable assumption.  Our offense would have been more coherent with Rondo (with frustrating and hopefully only intermittent periods of walk-it-up), our rebounding would have been much better with Sully and Barbosa would have changed the tempo and look of the bench completely with his energy.

I don't know who we'd have to give up to get Pekovic, someone good no doubt, but I'd love to have him.  Korver would solve our shooting woes about 3.2 seconds after he entered his first game in green but short of a sign-and-trade with Atlanta we can't afford him.  They wouldn't take JET or Lee for him, the numbers match up.  Interestingly, most of Atlanta's roster is in their final year of contract.  They only have $18M guaranteed for 2014-2015 (Horford, $12M; Louis Williams, $5.2M; John Jenkins, $1.25M.  $28M including players under option).  Expect a lot of trades by Atlanta this year as other teams want their players in sign-and-trades or for salary dumps.  Next summer is going to be WILD as Atlanta and LAL's rosters come almost completely off the books, putting a lot of veterans into free agency, and the draft next year is supposed to be good.  That should drive down a lot of prices.  Not for us, of course, we'll still get stuck, but for those players.

We need height and beef, we can't expect KG to carry that load by himself and please don't talk to me about Melo.  We also need a legit backup point guard, which you did not address above.  If we can trade Lee and/or JET (not likely to get anybody to take JET off our hands) and maybe throw in our #16 for either of those, we're in good shape since we should be able to pick up the other via free agency.  Lee and #16 for Pekovic leaves us a slot for a gunner, for example.  With that deal, Minny could pick up a good defensive player and real pro and also have a shot at snagging Plumlee, Withey or some other big to replace Pekovic.  Pekovic would fix our beef issue just as fast as Korver would fix our shooting issue and KG could move back to PF, where he wants to be.  Maybe we can keep #16 and fix our b/u pg issue too.

My rambling conclusion is that we are already a lot younger than we were 2 years ago, stand to get younger as we add a draft pick (unlike the previous year where we got lucky Sully dropped but Melo is about what you'd expect from a low 1st rounder, we should be able to get someone who has a chance of sticking in the NBA at #16) and we're already seeing Trader Danny working hard.  What might happen is that he can't get rid of JET until the trading deadline and he only has 1 1/2 years left on his contract.  A team might, might, be willing to pick him up for a playoff surge and then use him the next year for a salary dump in his final contract year.


bob


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