Schilling, Beckett, Matsuzaka?

ESPN.com says the Sox may have submitted the top bid for the rights to negotiate with Japanese right-handed pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka. Sounds like a lot of money, but I like the move, since there don't seem to be a lot of other good options out there.

Interesting Video

Here's a really fascinating video of Bryan Colangelo during the first round of the last draft, trying desperately to get Williams late in the first round. It includes a call to Danny Ainge, asking him why he wanted Telfair instead. Interesting stuff.

(As I said right after the draft, I liked the Rondo pick better than the move for Telfair and think Boston should have chosen Roy, Foye, or Gay instead of trading for Telfair. I like all three of them a lot better than Telfair.)

As a Bulls fan, I found Charley Rosen's take on a recent Bulls game interesting. I thought it was pretty spot on in terms of strengths and weaknesses. Charley tends to be overly critical of players, but I thought his criticisms here were fair.

Any thoughts on the Celtics' season so far? From what I've read, Boston fans seem to be blaming the coach. I think the GM deserves more of the blame. But things will get better for you guys. I'd expect a finish closer to .500 than .250.

A little help?

Anyone recognize this Celtic?

Doh! Doc

I think this quote from the latest Bill Simmons column just about sums up how fans feel about Doc Rivers's tenure in Boston. It's an email from Danny in Boston:

"After walking through Faneuil Hall earlier today and seeing the statue of Red sitting on the bench smoking a cigar, I couldn't help but think to myself: Who would lead the Celtics to more wins, Doc Rivers or a replica statue of Red placed on the Celtics' bench?"

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
------------------------------------------------------------

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.

Frank Lampard.

What an amazing shot.

Red on roundball

One of my early memories of televised Celtics games were the basketball clinics that Red Auerbach would do during half time on different aspects of the game. If I remember correctly, they were titled 'Red on Roundball'

In this clip Red, Bill Russell, Tiny Archibald (Celtics PG '79-83) and someone else combine to walk through defensive positioning in the post.

In case you can't decide who to root for

Because I don't spend enough time following the NBA as it is, I've taken the dangerous plunge of joining a 16-team fantasy league with a bunch of basketball obsessives who know a hell of a lot more than me. Since you're all dying of curiosity, this is my opening night roster, in the order they were drafted:

1: LeBron James (SF) Cle
32: Kirk Hinrich (PG, SG) Chi
33: Carlos Boozer (PF, C) Uta
64: Manu Ginobili (SG) Sas
65: Andrew Bogut (PF, C) Mil
96: Mike Miller (SG, SF) Mem
97: T.J. Ford (PG) Tor
128: Jamal Crawford (SG) NyK
129: Mike Dunleavey (SF) GSt
160: Brevin Knight (PG,SG) Cha
161: Jeff Foster (PF,C) Ind

My rookie middle-round draft strategy was, when picking among roughly equal players, to favor those eligible for multiple positions so I have a lot of flexibility from night to night to start the most productive players playing.

Rejected team names: 'LeBron and the white boys', 'LeBron and his honkies', 'Greg Kite's pickup squad'; Current team name: 'We demand a recount!' in anticipation of a rough season.

Red Auerbach, 1917-2006

RIP, coach

Headlines that make you almost crap your pants

and/or start thinking about Greg Oden

Pierce has ruptured ligament in knee, will need surgery

Breaking NBA news

from the Onion

Portland Trail Blazers Get Hint After Being Left Off 2006-07 NBA Schedule

PORTLAND, OR—Claiming that it would "just make an awkward situation even worse," Portland Trail Blazers head coach Nate McMillan said in a press conference last Sunday that he and his team "got the hint" after noticing his team's conspicuous absence on the 2006-07 NBA schedule, and will not make any attempt to play a basketball game this year. "At first we thought that they were giving us the first week off, but after looking at the schedule for the rest of the year, we understood what was going on," said McMillan, adding that after last year's league-worst 21-62 record, he thought this might be coming. "I feel we deserved to find out differently, maybe a phone call, but if they don't want us there, fine. We'll just have to find something else to do." League officials said in a statement yesterday that they appreciated the way the Trail Blazers were handling this, adding that the Atlanta Hawks and the New York Knicks have "been acting like a bunch of babies about the whole thing."

Get your Freak(onomics) on.

Stephen Dubner points out that Celtics Dancer Alexis' favorite book is Freakonomics. If she could spend a day with anyone in the world, it would be Jeffrey Sachs ("because he is brilliant") or Queen Rania of Jordan. Huh.

Voter information.

For an explanation, see here. If anyone objects to this, let me know.

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Kenny Rogers cheated.

See here.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Please find the ESPN Insider in your office and ask him or her:

(1) What -- if anything -- is new in today's piece about Telfair and the Celtics?

(2) What's the rumoured deal between the Celtics and the Jazz for Carlos Boozer?

SI's Celtics predictions

SI's NBA preview rankings have the Celtics finishing 14th in the East. The headline is "The star can do it all except lead his team into the playoffs."

Rondo a la turk

Been meaning to pose this question -- for poeple who have actually seen Rajon Rondo play, are you as enthused as Shira Springer and Bill Simmons?

Is ESPN.com smearing Sebastian Telfair?

Here are the first paragraphs of a story on ESPN.com at this hour titled, "Celts' Telfair denies role in shooting of rapper Fabolous":

Boston Celtics guard Sebastian Telfair denied Friday that he is under investigation for the shooting of rapper Skylar John Jackson -- also known as Fabolous -- but the police are singing a different tune.

"I wasn't being investigated for any shooting," Telfair told reporters on Friday at the Celtics' practice facility in Waltham, Mass. "My necklace was snatched from my neck." However, the New York police say Telfair is being investigated.

"We're investigating whether there's a connection between the reported robbery and the shooting," New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne told The Associated Press earlier this week.

The 21-year-old Telfair had a $50,000 chain ripped off his neck early Tuesday morning outside Justin's, a Manhattan club owned by hip-hop mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs. Twenty minutes later, Jackson, 28, was shot and wounded in the left thigh outside of the club. The New York Daily News reported that surveillance video captured two members of Fabolous' entourage robbing Telfair. The paper's sources claim Telfair saw the men inside the club and made a cell phone call. The security camera reportedly captured the shooter leaving in a grey car.

According to Assistant District Attorney Nicole Blumberg, several witnesses heard gunshots outside the East 22nd Street restaurant at about 12:30 a.m. There were a number of calls to 911, and one witness took down the make and license plate of a sport utility vehicle leaving the scene, she said.

After the incident, four men, including Fabolous, were arrested and charged with having unregistered, loaded weapons in their SUV.

Telfair left Tuesday night's Celtics game against the Knicks after halftime to view lineups, which contained Fabolous and members of his entourage. The 21-year-old Telfair was unable to identify the suspect.

"I was in an unfortunate situation, if you want to say I'm a bad person because I was out with my fiance, then that's what it is. I know who I am, my teammates and this organization know who I am," Telfair told reporters.

Go back and look at the first three paragraphs. The story starts with Telfair's denial. Then it contradicts him: "However, the New York police say Telfair is being investigated." But the story lacks a single sentence or source to support this statement. The next paragraph quotes a NYPD spokesman as saying that the police were "investigating whether there's a connection between the reported robbery and the shooting." This hardly means that Telfair is a suspect. Perhaps Telfair was robbed by people later involved in the shooting. If so, Telfair had some bad luck, but did nothing wrong.

Either ESPN.com knows more than it is saying here, in which case this is bad journalism, or they are dragging his name through the mud, in which case it is bad journalism at Sebastian Telfair's expense.

Ouch.

Meet Jeff Suppan, NLCS MVP. Why can't the Sox get pitchers like him?

Rondo.

I hope y'all saw the Rajon Rondo highlight tonight.