Bloodthirsty Shut-Ins Arise!

   I'll tell you....you'd need to have Senator McCain's sense of hope to be a Celtics fan these days. Ol' John knows about Asian methods of torture, and he'd be the first to tell you that sometimes the worst part of the Chinese Water Torture isn't the millionth drop hitting you in the head....it's WAITING for the drop to hit you that makes you tell the Vietcong where the airbase is. There's no real shame in it....after awhile, a human can't stands no more, as Popeye used to say.

   I can remember Rick Pitino's last year running Gang Green. They had just got blown out again, and reporters were up in his sauce regarding why the team still sucked 3 years after they shamefully retired Auerbach and gave Pitino a ransom to turn it around.

   The team had just got brown trouted on, the press was unforgiving, and Pitino had seen enough. He had been at Kentucky too long, and wasn't used to having no answers for some Boston Globe scribbler's day-after-day questioning. Finally- about a week or two before he fled like a wharf rat- he unloaded on Boston and it's media.

   "There's this doomed attitude among people in this town.....the bloodthirsty shut-ins that make up this 'Fellowship of the Miserable'. That's the real Curse here. They just won't let these kids learn and grow. Well, I'll say this to them....Larry Bird ain't walkin' through that door....neither is Parish or McHale.....and if they do, they'll be old and grey."

   It was the best non-Lasorda rant I ever saw (check Howard Stern's show occasionally to hear Tommy's drunken rant to some poor call-in host....best interview ever), and you could just tell that the end was near. Pitino was generally so composed, so hopeful, so seemingly competent, so well-dressed...imagine a positive Michael Corleone, and you'd understand how hard it was to watch Pitino reduced to doing low-rent General Hospital drama in some sweaty Boston locker room as it became clear that he had failed. He fell to pieces like dropped puzzle.

   The Celtics rebounded from those dark days....as soon as Pitino was shown the door, they went on a run and made the playoffs. Some guys just don't have it. It's never easy cutting your losses.  Pitino was an East Coast guy, perfectly at home in some North End pasta house, and it should have ended differently. It didn't.

   The only thing more pitiful is when it happens again. Take a kid who played for the team in the glory days. Watch him earn his stripes on TNT and in Phoenix. Listen to him talk about youth/desire/fundamentals. You get to feeling good about the future. If Pitino had said "Danny Ainge won't be walking through that door," he'd have been wrong. In fact, Danny has Pitino's GM job now.

   And he sucks at it so bad, you are almost personally drawn to Boston by the force of it.

   Keep in mind....I love my Celtics. Always have. I love them when they win titles, and I love them when M.L. Carr coaches them to 18 wins. I love them now. I'll love them when I'm some crazy old lady in a morphine coma in some Florida nursing home. That's why it hurts so much when Danny Ainge starts haphazardly tossing players around like a brood of raccoons set loose on an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.

   Women in America generally live to be 78 or so, and I'm on the far side of twenty already. I saw too many old men die around here without seeing the Red Sox do the job to tolerate the team I love bringing in an incompetent. Ainge is in over his head...we just need someone with a big foot to step on his head for 3 minutes or so.

 

  Strong statement, yes....but the evidence is too damning for denial now. Here's my Flow Chart of Damnation for the Ainge regime, in order of how I bring it up.

- Danny may not have inked the whole thing, but Vin Baker's situation was handled about as poorly as it could have been. Vin's constant thirst ended his time here, but we're stillpaying Gin Baker 5 million a year. That's a Jason Richardson salary, being paid to some guy who lists "wake-up slug out of the night-stand rum flask" as his favorite drink as he wastes space on Houston's bench.

- Antoine Walker gets shipped off with change to Dallas for the 6 year, fifty-plus million dollar contract that is Raef Lafrenz. Raefer Madness took on a new definition: paying some stiff Kobe money to put up 10/6 numbers and not being able to guard anyone with darker skin than Renee Zelewegger.

   If you look really closely at Raef's forehead, you can see a dim Jerry West sillhouette.....forcibly imprinted there by the hundreds of NBA jerseys smashed into his face as people drove down the lane and gigged on him, as Shaq used to say. As a defender, he's slightly less effective then the Maginot Line, and slightly more effective than just taking the ball and putting it into the opponent's basket for them yourself.

   He's also paid to the extent that means , unless the salary cap is modified with Goofy White guy exceptions, he'll be our second best player until 2010.....unless Pierce is traded, at which point the team is (financially) built on Raef and his paper mache knees.

   Even if we cut him, he's still hanging off our salary cap like a 6'11" albatross.....unless he takes the league minimum to ride bench with a good team- and whatever Raef's problems may be, he isn't suffering from the Traumatic Brain Injury that would process that scenario as a "good idea."

- The Ricky Davis deal that drove Coach OB out of town was just plain ugly. Trading the heart of his defense (Tony Battie and Eric Williams) against his wishes, Ainge basically Steinbrennered a pretty good coach out of town to bring in a kid who was famous for missing his own shot to get a triple double.Ainge was forced into this- he had traded a 20ppg guy for a 10ppg guy, and had only bench players to deal.

   Ricky Davis has actually made Danny look good. "He's a changed man," aswe like to say here. He may have been the best 6th Man in the NBA last year, and can put his name up with Pierce's when credit for last year's playoff team is handed out. While Mr. Richard Davis has behaved most of the time, he's near the bottom as far as Pippenesque sidekicks go. So we have to score in the draft....

- Ainge has brought in Marcus Banks, Kendrick Perkins, Al Jefferson, Delonte West, Tony Allen, Justin Reed, Gerald Green and Ryan Gomes to town these past three drafts, with middle first round picks to work with. Not bad at all. West and Allen are the 4th guards you expect to get in the late twenties. Banks, while struggling to learn the position, is one of the NBA's fastest guards. Perkins and Jefferson are promising high school big men, while Green and Gomes both look like keepers.

   While Ainge supporters point to these players as proof of his GM abilities, I see it as a sign that Danny would make a good scout for a GM who doesn't do stupid s*** like pay Raef fifty million dollars. None of these dudes has averaged more than 6ppg in the NBA, either.....that's 6 first rounders with no star, unless Jefferson and Green are the real thing. We are youngyoungyoung, and getting younger every year.

   Simply put, while not equipped to win in the NBA, the youthful Celtics look to be the team to beat at the 2004 McDonald's All American high school all star game. Too bad they already played it....

- Worried that Raef might Lafrenz a few of those 6 years on the IR, Danny Boy went out and signed the very average Mark Blount to a 6 year deal that made those dudes who sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $24 look like Donald Friggin' Trump. Mark is a nice guy, but his Hands Of Stone talent doesn't merit a 6 year deal.

- Since his #1 pick didn't know how to run the point, Danny went out and got Gary Payton. Payton, already beginning to calcify, kept the kids (West, Allen, Banks) on the bench while he showed them how to revoke trades by threatening to not report.

- Remember Antoine? Wasting away in Atlanta, Employee #8 had a huge contract set to expire. Ainge went out and got him for Payton, some expiring salary and a #1 draft pick. He then was traded- after a first round playoff exit- for a pair of second rounders and some guy that Utah didn't want and a guy who is awaiting trial for dogfighting.

   That's right, folks....Antoine Walker was traded for/away 3 times in a year and change....by the same team.His legacy is Tony Allen, the ghost of Gary Payton, and Captain Raef of the U.S.S. Frequently Injured. And the Hawks, who traded for a guy (Payton) who never reported to the team, ended up getting the better of the Celtics in the long run. You just don't see that anymore.

   Walker and Raef also served to keep Jefferson and Perkins on the bench, so we could screw up our present and our future at the same time. It's like an anti-IRA.

- He has done not a blessed thing to squash the Pierce trade rumors.  Pierce must want out of here like yesterday, and when he leaves, this is a twenty win team unless Gerald Green turns out to be Jordan Now. 

AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

   Enough is enough. Danny Ainge should be seized by a mob, dragged through the streets of Boston, and thrown off the pier in Charlestown with specific instructions given to the Atlantic Ocean to deposit him somewhere in the area of Liberia. Hopefully, he'll get involved in the insurrection there, and he'll learn how things work when your decisions actually have a little consequence to them. Pinned down by Monrovia sniper fire as he takes the wrong street, it will seem like a million miles away from those days when he tore up my Celtics like a goat set loose in the vegetable garden. 

Oh, what might have been...