Lights…. Camera….

By RedsArmy.com Columnist

John Karalis

01/15/2006

Boston is now a room full of smokers who’ve had their cartons suddenly snatched away. With the Pats out of the playoffs and the Red Sox in disarray, sports fans around here are going to need a fix, and they’re going to need it bad.

Who are they going to turn to? The Bruins? Sorry. That’s like turning to David Lee Roth because you don’t want to buy Sirius and listen to Howard Stern. No, the Bruins won’t cut it. It’s the Celtics… or nothing.

Hey, I know the C’s aren’t much of a step up right now from the Black and Gold. But they’ve made their splash. They traded away their big gun, and it blew up in their faces. The C’s still have cards to play, and here are the options they have to suddenly be worthy of the spotlight.

Fire The Coach

Like the Romans thirsting for blood as the Gladiators paced the Coliseum, the local media loves nothing more when the head of an underachieving coach is brought to them on a pike. If the Patriots start 0-4 next year, you know there will be people saying things like “They’ve stopped listening to Belichick, it’s time for a new voice.”

And so with the Celtics reeling after countless painful losses, one option facing Danny Ainge is sacrificing Doc Rivers and taking the bench himself.

Compelling arguments can be made for both firing and keeping Doc. Teams that blow late leads, turn the ball over at the wrong time, and can’t seem to defend in the clutch are usually the product of poor coaching. At some point, Doc’s got to be able to figure out how to either adjust when he sniffs the beginning of a collapse, or how to make moves earlier in games to keep them from happening. In recent games, Doc has played young guys early, and veterans late in an effort to do just that. But maybe what this team needs are some youthful legs down the stretch to make those defensive rotations.

On the other hand, Doc can only do so much with what he has. Is it his fault that Mark Blount turned the ball over 7 times against Philly? Is it his fault that Al Jefferson is struggling right now? One of the knocks on Doc is that his rotation is all over the place, but it’s really only his low-post rotation that’s in disarray. You can mark down Pierce-Davis-West as your starters on a daily basis. But it’s that last combination of big men that’s keeping Doc up at night. Is that a fire-able offense?

Make A Move

If the Bruins can get headlines by making a big trade, then the Celtics can certainly do the same. Does that mean discarding Paul Pierce in a headline-grabbing move? I don’t think so.

A Thorton-esque trade is an attention getter when all eyes are somewhere else. When the spotlight is actively searching for you, all you have to do is make a little noise so it knows where you are. The Celtics have tradable commodities in Marcus Banks, Kendrick Perkins and, to a lesser extent because of his contract, Mark Blount.

But a package involving Banks and Blount makes the most sense for this team. Banks is a point guard with a tremendous amount of ability and unfulfilled promise, something NBA GM’s love nowadays. Everyone seems to want to be the guy who “discovered” someone big. Banks could be that kind of guy.

Blount is a different story. He cashed in when GM’s were sniffing glue and signing mediocre big men to big contracts last year (see: Adonal Foyle’s 6 years/$51 million deal). But his game isn’t that bad if you want a big guy who can draw defenders away from the basket. You can’t argue with 13 points a game. What you can argue with is less than 5 rebounds per game. He’s paid like a guy who will give you a double-double every night, but plays like an undersized power forward.

The Celtics need a banger, a low post defender that will be happy pulling down 15 boards while scoring 5 points. Mark’s not going to be that guy, and Kendrick Perkins is just too awkward right now to effectively do that job. Mark’s game could work somewhere else, even at $7 Mil. a year

Win A Few Games

I know, that’s a bit glib. But really, what other way is there to get attention in this town? Boston is the new Title-Town. We’re winners, baby. We’re still glowing after the Sox won it all. The Pats can still be a dynasty if they go back to the Super Bowl next year. “Good Effort” and “We’re Almost There” might fly in Memphis or Charlotte, but in Boston, we’re all about the “W’s”.

You can fire coaches, you can trade players, but in the end, it’s all about winning. The one thing that used to separate Celtics fans from everyone else was the tradition of winning. Pats fans are still a little new to this thing. Red Sox fans had their decades of misery to sustain them. Bruins fans… well, Bruins fans are what Celtics fans are about to become if Danny’s not careful. It’s been more than 40 years since a Stanley Cup has come to Boston (if you don’t count Ray Bourque’s personal championship 5 years ago). If you were to mate a Celtics fan with a Red Sox fan in the late 90’s, you’d get today’s Bruins fan: A person who can still taste what winning was, but is right at the edge of forgetting. That’s what Celtics fans are about to become. And that’s hardly fitting of what was the league’s most successful franchise.

So the spotlight is on. The question is, are the Celtics ready to do what it takes to take center stage?