06-07 Boston Celtics - Tanking, Trading Pierce, and the Future

Last night’s loss to the Pistons was another example of just how this year’s C’s team season has gone, but a promising glimpse into the future. Sure the Pistons didn’t really have anything to play for, they were all ready locked into the #1 seed in the East and rested several of their premiere players. Either way we fought them hard to the end, tying the game with a few seconds remaining, just to see the game slip away.

In good news, our young players had an opportunity to play a lot of minutes and took full advantage of that opportunity. Rondo, Ray, Jefferson, and Gomes each scored just shy of 20 points with 19, 18, 17, and 19 respectively. Add to that 15 boards by Jefferson, 9 assists and 6 steals by Rondo, and 4-6 three point shooting by Ray and it’s not hard to see that the future could very easily be bright for these C’s.

So where does Pierce fit into all this? Many have argued that the young guys only play well when he’s not on the court. I can see what they’re saying on this one. It’s a little bit of the Kobe syndrome if you ask me. You surround a superstar with a lot of young talent and they tend to get a bit stagnant when he’s on the court. Deferring to him rather than looking for their own spot in the offense. It gets even worse when your star isn’t a very good distributor of the ball, something Kobe Bryant was able to overcome at the beginning of this season (but didn’t do at the end of the year). The question is, should we bring Pierce back or not? His trade value is still high and it’s something that definitely merits some thought. But we’ll address that in a separate article.

So on to the tanking question. It’s not hard to see that the C’s weren’t exactly giving it their all at all times this season. As soon as Pierce went down early this season, the tanking suspicions arose. I didn’t want to believe it myself, but it’s hard to say they weren’t tanking to a certain extent even that early in the year. Add to that the times when Jefferson would sit out with all sorts of random injuries that no one was even aware of until game time. No matter how you like at it, the fact is we ended up with the 2nd worst record in the league and “should” have a top 2 pick in this year’s NBA draft. Should that happen, one would imagine we will end up with Greg Oden or Kevin Durant…but which one is the smarter pick? That too will be discussed another day…

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