A Rebuilding Meets A Falling Apart

Even the NY Times is ripping them.  I guess, given what we saw, what else could they do?


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/sports/basketball/a-rebuilding-meets-a-falling-apart.html?_r=1&

A Rebuilding Meets a Falling Apart
By HARVEY ARATON
Published: December 8, 2013


Growing up in an Indianapolis suburb, little Brad Stevens must have paid close attention when he attended his first basketball camp, run by three former Indiana University players, including Mike Woodson, in the early 1980s.

“I don’t remember watching him play, but growing up in a house where Dad was an I.U. grad, certainly I was familiar with his name and what he accomplished,” Stevens said before matching coaching wits with the Knicks’ Woodson, 55, for the first time in his rookie professional coaching season with the Boston Celtics.

Still the picture of precocious youth, 37 going on 27, Stevens crinkled his brow and said, “He’s not going to be happy with me when I share this.”

What could Woodson have been happy about Sunday, when the Celtics shared the ball munificently, dogged Knicks perimeter shooters passionately and blew them out of Madison Square Garden, 114-73?

Losing at home to San Antonio last month by 31 points was understandable, if not acceptable. But what could be said about absorbing the third-worst loss in franchise history to a team in full rebuilding mode after hiring Stevens, formerly of Butler, to reflect the storied Celtics’ downsizing to N.B.A. midmajor status?

“I wish I could explain it,” was the best Woodson could say about the crash and burn of the formerly trending notion that his 5-14 team had reawakened from its early-season coma. A frustrated and bewildered Carmelo Anthony added, “You can’t teach team effort.”

But as much temptation as there is to make this about the perceptibly swell job that Stevens has done in getting the Celtics to play with a collective and collegiate purpose while guiding them to the top of the Atlantic Division — with twice as many victories as the Knicks — let’s hold off on that story line.

Let’s defer to Stevens, who said, “Everything we did will get overexaggerated, and everything they did will get overexaggerated.”

In the spirit of Stevens’s call for a pragmatic caution, we can wait for Friday night’s rematch in Boston before making a more definitive assessment of what to make of the Knicks’ coming out for a noon tip and trailing Jeff Green, Avery Bradley and friends by 25-3 before the game was nine minutes old.

When it was over, when the Celtics had outrebounded the jump-shooting-crazed home team by 46-26 and outscored them inside by 42-22, Tommy Heinsohn, a Retired Number Celtic and a legendarily provincial broadcaster, strolled into the Boston locker room and asked, “Was that good, or was that good?”

Sitting near the entrance, point guard Rajon Rondo, who is recovering from knee surgery, looked up from his smartphone and smirked.

In the news — if you could call it that — was a recent report, emanating from an old prep school coach of Anthony’s, suggesting that New York’s leading man has been trying to talk Rondo into signing with the Knicks when his contract with the Celtics expires after next season. If Anthony is the Knicks’ chief recruiter when he’s already on record as planning to opt out of his own contract next summer to explore free agency, it’s no wonder the franchise is in such a state of confusion.

Fortunately, Rondo declined to dribble the crystal ball, invoking his right as an injured player not to speak with reporters. But his presence at the Garden was also a reminder that he is planning a return and, healthy, is an All-Star who certainly would have some effect on a divisional race that could be a season-long bumper-cars concession.

By next summer, if the Celtics have decided they can’t risk losing Rondo on the open market without getting anything in return, he could also become a formidable trade chip. If you haven’t heard, Danny Ainge, Boston’s president for basketball operations, seems to know what he’s doing after punctuating the Doc Rivers/Kevin Garnett/Paul Pierce era last summer.

The pawning off of his geriatric warriors, Pierce and Garnett, on the Nets helped stock the Celtics with nine first-round picks during the next five years. They already have some young talent — their second-year forward-center, Jared Sullinger, made 9 of 13 shots and outscored the Knicks’ Andrea Bargnani, 21-2.

Conversely, Iman Shumpert, by reputation the Knicks’ best young player, began his day by shooting an air ball, dribbling the ball off his foot and futilely chasing assorted Celtics as fluid body and ball movement created lanes to the basket and open-perimeter looks that resulted in Boston’s making 14 of 25 3-point attempts.

Shumpert finished with no points and shot 0 for 6 from the field. It didn’t help him, Tim Hardaway Jr. (making his first pro start) or J. R. Smith that the Celtics never had to double-team Anthony after Stevens had said, “He’s one of a handful of players in the league where you go into the game knowing that you’re probably going to have to put two guys on him at some point.”

Afterward, Stevens admitted, “You don’t want to do that unless you have to, and it never really presented itself.”

In other words, the ball movement shown by the Knicks during their longest winning streak of the season — two — disappeared because, take your pick: Anthony reverted to old habits, or everyone else was awful, or the Knicks’ offense often breaks down when confronted with determined perimeter resistance.

However ugly this game was, the more pertinent and frightening post-mortem for Knicks fans would be to contemplate the Celtics rising to the same competitive plane during Year 1 of their rebuild. Because they do have a plan and the resources to get much better, while the Knicks, well, put it this way: They couldn’t even understand or explain what happened to them Sunday.



bob



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