An end-- or just a suspension?-- of misery

It's the kind of franchise that the Celtics are these days that a highlight of the basketball season is when they finally go home for the summer and the good teams all duke it out in the playoffs. With the regular season over and a month to wait until the NBA lottery order is determined, its as good a time as any to summarize the train wreck that was the 2006-2007 season

The Celtics finished 24-58 (.293 winning percentage) which made them officially the second-worst Celtics team of all time. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, only the absolutely pathetic ML Carr 19-win squad a decade ago had a lower winning percentage than this year's group of supposedly professional basketball players.

We can debate how much criticism for all this losing the front office should take, now that the team is headed for the top of a historically good draft and revisionist history is pouring out of Causeway Street in waves. It doesn't look good for Ainge, however, that he spent six months before this season adamantly insisting this was a playoff squad. Nor that the players he had assembled fell flat on their faces at the start of the year, well before injuries shortened the rotation. Playing one of the easiest early-season schedules in the league—including a majority of their games at home against non-playoff teams— the Cs plummeted to an NBA-worst 5-13 by early December. This was all before Pierce’s “injuries” and the to the historic 18-game losing streak.

So what kind of assets do we have on our roster? Where are our strengths and where are the holes? The following assessment is not based on potential, or trade value, but strictly each player's most recent production on the court. Players that are not starting-quality, but who are good enough to be the first off the bench at their position (point, wing, post) get slotted as 'rotation'. If you're not even that good you're 'bench'. If your medical future is sufficiently uncertain then you're 'unfit or unknown'.



I'll add to this a couple observations

- First, whether or not someone starts is obviously not always correlated with whether they are 'starting quality'. Lots of lottery teams start players out of desperation that would only play 5-10 minutes a night on a 55-win playoff squad. Lots of strong playoff teams have starting-quality talent coming off the bench.
- Second, he best players on your team by and large determine how many games you win in the NBA. Having a really good 9th or 10th man is nice, but not nearly as important as how many and how good the starting quality (or better) players are. This becomes even more true in the playoffs. As the Celtics found out this year, when you don’t have much in the way of top talent, you do a whole lot of losing. During the brief window at the end of the season when Pierce and Jefferson healthy and allowed to play the Celtics won three road games against playoff teams in a week (San Antonio, Toronto and Orlando). Without Pierce the team didn't win for over a month.

Player-by-player assessments to follow in the next post