Rooting for the worst team in the league

M's earlier post about Doc prompted me to fetch the following out of its 'draft' status and finally post it
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Waiting for any substantial results to come in from Senate races in Virginia, Missouri and Montana (I don't have much optimism for Tennessee) is as good a time as any to check in on our local, supposedly illustrious pro basketball team.

This week, the especially notable thing about the Celtics is that they may have achieved an elusive double-whammy of basketball honors. Yes, the Celtics are currently tied for the worst record in the NBA (0-3) while holding undisputed last place in ESPN's power rankings (the big 3-'dead last'-0 out of 30).

I've had the makings of a longish 'state of the Celtics' post rattling around in the back of my head for a while. At one point it might have been a pre-season preview, but it's now a little late for that. Whatever we want to title it, the content is long on flaws and lean on optimism.

A cliff notes summary of the flaws of the current team would include the following:

1) Almost 70% of the team's rotation players are 24 years and younger (e.g. Perkins, Jefferson, Gomes, West, Allen, Telfair, Rondo) which is a receipt for disaster if you want to win games in the here and now of the NBA. Winning teams are stocked with veterans, and the conventional wisdom that the NBA chews up and spits out youngsters gets confirmed every season. A friend, G., looked at the rosters of every NBA team over the last 30 years and found only one with as many young rotation players as this year's Celtics that won more than 50% of their regular season games: the 2004-05 Chicago Bulls. It's highly unlikely that the Celtics as currently constructed will achieve similar success.

2) The Celtics are incredibly thin in the front court. Indeed, they have nobody at PF or C that can be considered a reliable NBA player. The situation is so bad that three stiffs that by rights should be playing in Greece or the NBADL (Brian Scalanbrine, Theo Ratliff, Michael Olowakandi) will probably log regular rotation minutes for the Cs this season.

3) Ainge has stocked this roster with an incompatible mix of players that are best suited for different offensive schemes. Work-in-progress athletes such as Telfair, Rondo, Allen and Green are best suited for an up-tempo, fast-break system that masks their deficiencies at playing half-court basketball. Unfortunately, the other half of our rotation is full of players like Pierce, Szczerbiak and Perkins who are poorly suited, at best, for up-tempo basketball. Last season we watched the team institute a high-post motion offense so that they could play Delonte West big minutes at PG (West is completely unable to create dribble penetration or create his own shot, requiring non-PGs to initiate offensive sets). This offense allowed West to flourish (statistically he was the third best player on the team). The problem was that the team also wanted to give big minutes to Jefferson and Perkins, who were completely unable to do the things a high-post offense requires of its big men (e.g. make quick and appropriate passes, hit 10' shots, make intelligent decisions away from the ball, not turn the ball over). The result of Ainge's hodge-podge approach to assembling a roster is a group for whom the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

If you're looking for a silver lining, it might be this: the conventional wisdom has been that the Celtics would need to trade Pierce to get bad enough to rebuild with any success through the draft. If the Celtics continue their early season awful ways, however, they might end up with a great draw in the Oden sweepstakes without every officially blowing things up. Is this great good fortune or the road to disaster? We might have a lot of time this season to debate that.