Uncoordinated but identical criticism

Was it only three and four years ago that I was regularly criticizing Peter May for being overly critical of Ainge while being sloppy with the facts? It's a sign of how far things have come that we're now largely in agreement on the former. This from this morning's basketball notes column:

A healthy disregard for the facts

Revisionist history is already in full force in Boston. The comments that the Celtics would have made the playoffs "had they been healthy" are almost laughable.

First, every team has injuries, and it's the playoff-caliber teams that respond to that that make the playoffs. Consider that Houston went 20-12 without Yao Ming or that Miami went 16-7 without Dwyane Wade. The Rockets and Heat are going to the playoffs. The Celtics went 4-31 without Paul Pierce. That's astonishing. (Actually, they went 4-29 and threw two others.) Atlanta won twice as many games without Joe Johnson.

And, yes, other guys got hurt, too. But other guys got hurt in Memphis, which went 5-22 without Pau Gasol. And other guys got hurt in Milwaukee, which went 3-17 without Michael Redd. Those teams aren't trying to rewrite history and claiming they'd be playoff teams had they stayed healthy.

It's all part of the "Yeah, But We Really Weren't That Bad" spin. This was, at best, a mid- to high-30-win team. The Celtics were 10-14 after the Golden State game in which Pierce got hurt, having played the easiest schedule in the league. Their much-ballyhooed five-game winning streak had come against the Nets, Knicks, Sixers, pre-Allen Iverson Nuggets, and Bobcats. They had yet to play a single road game against a Western Conference team. They had yet to play Miami. They had lost to Memphis at home.

If you want to believe the Celtics, fine. If you want to believe they can bring back the same team next year and make the playoffs, fine. Maybe they can. But the team this year wasn't good enough, healthy or otherwise, and they should admit it.

There has been a sometime chorus of Celtics loyalists in Boston this winter repeating different versions of 'when the best players on your team get injured you're bound to lose a lot of games'. In addition to the examples May mentions above, there is the obvious counter-example of the 2004-05 Indiana Pacers, a team that lost their two best players (Jermaine O'Neal and Ron Artest) for much of the season and still won 44 games and made the second round of the playoffs.

What does it say about Ainge that-- four years into his management of the team-- when the only player he didn't add to the roster (Pierce) goes down with an injury the remainder of the roster plummets to a record-setting awful record?