For the first time since the acquisition of Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen four years ago, fans of the Boston Celtics once again find themselves rooting for a team that most likely doesn’t have a chance of winning a championship. It’s a difficult truth to accept, but it is a truth nonetheless. Age has finally caught up on the Big Three, they no longer have a game-changing defensive anchor at the Center position, and Rajon Rondo can’t do it all on his own. Add to these factors a severly depleted bench in comparison to their 2008 championship team, as well as their sometimes extreme underachievement, and their 21-19 record doesn’t come as too much of a surprise.
For some teams, anything over a .500 winning percentage is acceptable. But that’s not how it is for the Celtics – their standards as an organization have been set by incredible achievment and sucess in the past, and these standards simply aren’t being reached this year. There’s been a surprising amount of inconsistency this year, with some blowout losses that have us questioning if they’ll even sneak their way into the playoffs, but then some blowout wins and hot streaks that indicate there might be some hope yet. Then, there are games like that of their most recent 97-94 loss to the LA Lakers, in which the two teams are back and forth until the very end. But it seems more often than not that Boston finds itself on the “back” side as opposed to “forth” as the final buzzer goes off in those nail-biting close games.
From the very start of the season, it was clear that this was not the team that Celtic fan base have enjoyed specataing over the past three or four years. But in reality, their woes didn’t begin with this season. It started when General Manager Danny Ainge traded their starting center, Kendrick Perkins – loved by both fans and players- as well as one of their better bench players in Nate Robinson, for Jeff Green and Nenad Kristic of the Oklahoma City Thunder midway through last year. Ainge’s reasoning behind the trade was Perkin’s expiring contract, and his fear that they would loose one of their starters to free agency with nothing in return. But with Green now suffering from severe heart problems and Kristic returning to Russia to play in his home country, the Celtics ended up trading Perk for, essentially, nothing.
And now, the Celtics are left with a gaping hole in their starting five, as well as an almost unrecognizable bench full of subpar players like Sasha Pavlovic and Keyon Dooling. It seems unlikely that any big moves will be made by Aigne, with the deadline quickly approaching on March 15, but there is still reason to remain hopeful. With both Garnett and Allen’s expiring contract opening up about $30 million of cap space end the close of this season, there will be plenty of money for Ainge to play around with. And there always remains the possibility that the Celtics will manage to reel in the Big Dog of the 2012 offseason, the best free agent available, Dwight Howard.
