Mark Blount and minutes (part 3 in a series)

M., it's good to see from your post that we are moving ever closer to agreement on this point and that you are now agreeing that this trade didn't have much of anything to do with minutes.

There are still, however, two recurring themes to your argument that I’m going to push back on. These are:

1) that the Celtics should/would prefer to spread their minutes out among all the big men on their roster; and
2) that the team’s displeasure with Blount was having or going to have any effect on how much they played him.

Before I address both directly, let me take what’s going to appear like a tangent on player rotations.

How should the Celtics decide, over the course of the season, how to allocate minutes at the PF & C positions? Since their four best players (Blount, Raef, Al, Perkins) can more or less play either position we don’t need to worry too much about setting up different rotations for each position separately. We’re going to leave Gomes out of this discussion because 1) he’s only played 13 minutes in the last 17 games for a reason and 2) he just ain’t an NBA PF by any stretch. We’re also going to leave Veal out because he's so clearly worse than the four players listed above that he only makes it into games in garbage time, for situational match-ups and out of desperation. We’re also going to talk about the allocation of minutes on average, with the understanding that game-by-game things might vary a fair amount.

So how should a team divide 96 minutes among 4 players? Well— given that the most minutes that most big men play on a regular basis is around 30—you start by giving 30 minutes to your best player. By definition, since they’re your best player, every minute they’re on the court you have a better chance of winning the game then if one of your other/worse players were on the court. The same is true of your second best player, should a clear one exist. Playing them ~30 minutes a night will give you a better chance to win then giving some of those minutes to another/worse player. You can see where this is going.

So on average your chances of winning are maximized by having your best post player play ~30 minutes a night, your second-best post player play ~30 minutes a night, your third best post player play ~30 minutes a night, and dividing the remaining minutes among the scrubs.

What have the Celtics rotations looked like since the end of September? Blount has played 30 minutes/night, night in and night out. Raef has played ~24 minutes/night, Al and Perk ~20 minutes/night, Veal ~10 minutes/night. Well, this doesn’t look like what I just described. What’s going on?

Doc and Ainge have been giving quotes in the papers all season about how they’re waiting for some players on the team to step up and earn regular places in the rotation. Watching the games and looking at the minutes played it’s pretty easy to infer who they’re talking about. Mark Blount, for all his faults, has been the team’s best post player all season and is the only one to have a guaranteed place in the rotation. Raef, Al and Perk have all been inconsistent at best, so none of them have been either playing a regular 30 minutes a night or banished to the bench to watch someone else play 30 minutes a night. That Veal has gotten even 10 minutes a game shows you how often Doc has been desperate.

Now, back to this trade issue.

Given that Blount has been the best post player on the team and the only player that Doc has been comfortable enough to play starters minutes night in and night out, why would you move him to give more minutes to people who aren’t playing as well? If you want to get Al and Perk more minutes there’s a very simple solution—bench Raef. Bench Veal. You don’t bench your best post player (Blount) in order to protect minutes for your 4th/5th best post players (Raef, Veal) unless you’re deliberately tanking the season for a lottery pick. Doc and Ainge have been very clear they are not.

So was this trade in any way about freeing up more minutes for Jefferson and Perkins? No. Those minutes have always been there for the taking. The trade was about removing an unpopular player on a long-term contract who unfortunately happened to be the only post player on the team to earn starters minutes in Doc's rotations.

To address some of your specific quotes:

First, if you played Blount, Perkins and Jefferson 30 minutes a night each, using your formula of 96 minutes for the center and PF position, you'd have exactly 6 minutes to split between Raef and Veal, as you call him. And that would mean nothing at all for any of the other big men on the roster.

Exactly. And that’s exactly what Doc would do, if/when Al and Perk were playing well enough to earn those minutes and Blount still on the roster. And, psst, other than the players you mention here there are no big men on the roster.

Now admittedly, increasing Perkins and Jefferson's minutes doesn't have to translate directly into a reduction in Blount's numbers. You certainly could reduce Raef or Scalabrine or Gomes or all three

Bingo. And this is exactly what Doc should and would do when the day comes that Perkins and Jefferson play high-quality NBA basketball for 30 minutes/night. The team wouldn’t play Raef and (dear god) Veal or Gomes over Blount for the reasons given above. Good evidence of this is the fact that the team hasn’t been playing Raef or Veal over Blount even though they’ve had months and months to do it.

it's safe to say that the Celtics (both players and management) didn't much care for Blount and thought he was lazy. So, given that, the Celtics figured playing the pups more would translate into fewer minutes for Blount

Mmmm… Sentence #1 is certainly true but in no way implies sentence #2. If sentence #2 is true, I haven’t seen any evidence for it to date. Indeed Blount’s play and demeanor has been by all accounts better this year than last. The only thing that kept Doc from playing him 30 minutes a night over the last two seasons was the trade for Antoine Walker, which suddenly gave the team a better PF who promptly did play 30+ minutes a night.

I'm not saying that jettisoning Blount "frees up" minutes. It's simply that there was a basketball determination that the youngsters were going to play more, and that for a variety of reasons, Blount was the odd man out

I’m not sure why frees up is in quotes but again, I have seen no evidence other than Ainge’s understandable white lie that the team planned to play Blount less in the future. Ainge’s white lie can be discounted as exactly the sort of diplomatic, tactful thing that GMs say all the time about players they just shipped out of town.