Celtics Journal: Game 10 of 82, Wed 11/19, Celtics @ Sixers (Disaster Averted)

Game 10 of 82 (12.2%), Wednesday, November 19, 430 PST

Celtics @ Sixers

(originally published at Splice Today)

A real NBA game took place last night in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The real Boston Celtics played the real Philadelphia 76ers in a game that counted in the real NBA standings. The stats were accumulated by the official scorer and the numbers will count in the final season totals of all players involved. Real NBA players like Henry Sims, Hollis Thompson, K.J. McDaniels (read Zach Lowe’s piece on McDaniels and contract negotiations among the non-lottery-bound young prospects of the NBA), and newly-arrived Robert Covington (“a name that would fit in Downton Abbey,” my friend Eric noted) all competed in this NBA game.

The Boston Celtics beat the Philadelphia 76ers 101-90 last night at a mostly empty Wells Fargo Center (do you think Wells Fargo believes attaching themselves to the Sixers is actually helping their brand?) in Philadelphia.

Official attendance: 12,701. Television view of crowd: mostly empty red seats with a few scattered lost souls milling about.

The few Sixers fans in attendance booed former-Sixer Evan Turner throughout the game. You might ask, “What did Evan Turner do to Sixers fans?” He was traded to Indiana last year, escaping the misery of Philadelphia’s final 28 games. Before the season, point guard Jrue Holliday was sent to New Orleans. At the deadline, Turner and big man Spencer Hawes were traded.

Before the Turner and Hawes trades, the Sixers resembled an NBA team, going 15-38 in their first 53 games of the year. They’d lost seven straight games at the time. Their previous win had come against the lowly Celtics (95-94) on January 29th. After they allowed their three best players to escape the tank, they lost in horrific fashion, as evil genius GM Sam Hinkie had planned. Their 16th win came on March 29th, two full months after win #15. Twenty-six straight losses tied an NBA record. Turner, the 2nd overall pick in the 2010 draft, had several solid years in Philly. Not quite what they’d hoped with a 2nd pick, but nowhere near a complete draft bust either.

Who to Boo

My guess is that Philly fans don’t know who to boo, because they don’t recognize most of their players, half of them going undrafted out of college, several of them unknown to even hardcore NBA fans. This leaves Sixers fans with no recourse but to boo former players lucky enough to have escaped, whom they do recognize.

What Actually Happened

Like they’ve done well most of the season, Boston shared the ball, no player taking more than 15 shots, while 6 players attempted 9 or more.

• Kelly Olynyk gives a valiant effort, but does not have the quick feet, the hops or the girth/physicality to play center in the NBA. Jared Sullinger does not have the quick feet or the hops, but he does have the girth (275 lbs) and the physicality. However, Sullinger is only 6’9″
• I hate to say it, but the Celtics will not play anything close to adequate defense as long as they play Olynyk and Sullinger together. Ideally, Olynyk becomes the 6th man, providing a lift to the bench.
• Phil Pressey is fun to watch, despite his own physical limitations. When the Sixers commentators mentioned he was 5’11” I thought, “with his shoes on.” Pressey desperately needs to add five feet to his range if he wants to stay in the league. Otherwise, he might be headed to Philadelphia in a trade soon.

The Perils of Coaching a Tank

Sixers coach Brett Brown has a career coaching record of 19-74, for a winning percentage of .204. This is not Brett Brown’s fault. Only Brian Winters, who patrolled the sidelines (no doubt with great sadness) for one full year in Vancouver and partial seasons in Vancouver and Golden State between 1996-2002) has a lower winning percentage (.196) than Brown among coaches who have coached more than 82 games.

I believe I saw Brett Brown chomping on Zoloft during timeouts. It was interesting to see Brown trying to remain calm when his team led early in the third quarter. Brown was an assistant in San Antonio for over a decade, winning four championships with the Spurs. Talk about highs and lows.

The Sixers may break the NBA record for worst start to a season. Currently 0-11, the record is 0-15. Their upcoming schedule includes the Suns, Knicks, Portland and Nets. Will Brown bench Michael Carter-Williams and Tony Wroten (Wroten would actually be a valuable Jamal Crawford-type 6th man on a good team) against Phoenix and save them for the Knicks the following night? The Knicks may provide their only hope of avoiding an 0-17 start.

Exploring the Pain

Michael Carter-Williams is a talented young guard (probably better suited to being a 6th man in the Shaun Livingston role) who has great athleticism and an enviable wing-span. He is in a brutal situation for a young player with real potential trying to establish himself. He recently wrote about his frustrations.

Disaster Averted for the Cs

In some games, there are no victories, only disasters averted.

The Celtics averted this tragedy because of the performances of three players: Jared Sullinger, Brandon Bass and bench-spark Marcus Thornton. Sullinger was 10 of 15 from the field, collecting 22 points, 9 boards and 4 assists without a turnover. Bass finished +19 with 23 points on 9 of 13 shooting, with a block and a steal. Thornton added 13 points in 20 minutes, on 3 of 5 from deep and added 4 steals.

I really wanted the Celtics to enjoy this win. After several painful losses, I wanted to see some smiles. They were not to be found. I suppose it’s hard to feel happy about averting disaster. Easier to feel relief.

Personally, I’d decided that if the Celtics lost this game, it would be time to slow this series of journal entries down, or at least, to swerve from the actual basketball games into diverse tangents that have little connection to the games. With this win, I can maintain a tenuous hold on my optimistic feeling that the Celtics will pull things together and grow into more confidence in December when the schedule eases up.

10 games down. 72 to go.

Nicely done, fellas.

24 (Slightly Absurd) NBA Certainties for the 2014-15 Season

The following twenty-four NBA-related events will most certainly occur over the course of the next eight months. 

1. On October 30, Blake Griffin “retaliates” against Serge Ibaka‘s third take-down of the game by blowing him kisses. Later in the game, Glen Davis crushes Ibaka and then pins him to the court in a wrestling maneuver. Davis is suspended for five games, but coach Doc Rivers buys Davis a new Tesla for his troubles.

2. The Minnesota Timberwolves will not be all that exciting in general, but Ricky Rubio to Andrew Wiggins and Rubio to Zach LaVine lob passes will be a nice distraction from the standings. Coach Flip Saunders gives Rubio an ultimatum in mid-November: “Get to the free-throw more or we’ll all start calling you, “Marco.”

3. Milwaukee Bucks coach Jason Kidd comes out of retirement in late-November because he wants to, “Teach Jabari the pick-and-roll.” Jabari Parker continues to pick-and-pop but refuses to “roll.”

4. Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob introduces pre-game three-point contests involving Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and new coach Steve Kerr. The Warriors start selling tickets for the pre-game event only.

December

5. Philadelphia 76ers second round pick K.J. McDaniels becomes first NBA player to have a 10 block, 10 turnover game against the downtrodden Orlando Magic.

6. Chicago Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau embraces the fact he finally has a deep bench and plays everyone 25 minutes per game, saving them for the playoffs. Derrick Rose will play the entire season.

7. ESPN.com crashes for several days in mid-December due to advanced metrics malfunctioning and causing panic.

8. In a New Year’s Eve special, longtime TNT commentator Marv Albert has a breakdown. After months of rotating broadcast partners, Albert retires mid-season, forcing Ernie Johnson into an awkward play-by-play role. Back in the studio, Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal won’t listen to Kenny Smith. Shaq keeps shouting, “Barbecued Chicken!” The ratings have never been better.

January

9.  The Boston Celtics take a league-record 53 three-pointers in a game against the Toronto Raptors, including 19 by Jared Sullinger. They make only 7. Sullinger finishes the game with 18 offensive rebounds.

10. LeBron James tells Dion Waiters that Waiters won’t be joining the Cleveland Cavs on their ten-day road trip in January, because he will be enrolled in anger management classes. Coach David Blatt simply nods in the background.

11. ESPN declares they will air every Cavs game from February 1 until the end of the season.

February

12. At the All-Star Break, the NBA announces the details of its new television deal on the salary cap, but the cap number keeps increasing every week, like it does with the Mega Millions. By June, the number is $140 million. Every team will have an inordinate amount of cap space and twelve assistant GMs will quit right before free agency begins in July, 2016.

13. The Houston Rockets beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 104-92. Only two Rockets score points in the game. James Harden gets 58. Dwight Howard scores 46. Kobe Bryant scores 31 points, taking 57 shots, in the least-efficient performance in league history. Lakers guard Jeremy Lin finally complains to the media about Kobe’s selfish ways. Rookie Julius Randle gets a DNP-CD from coach Byron Scott because he accidentally took a corner three-pointer the previous game. Phil Jackson‘s laughter can be heard from coast-to-coast.

14. The Indiana Pacers, who are averaging 64 points per game, trade away Roy Hibbert and David West to the Sacramento Kings for Ben McLemore and a future second-round pick. Larry Bird goes AWOL as soon as the season ends.

15. The Boston Celtics do not trade Rajon Rondo. Bill Simmons yells at Celtics GM Danny Ainge on The Grantland Basketball Hour. At 25-29, the Celtics make a run at the 8th seed in the weak Eastern Conference. In an ironic twist, the Celtics and Nets will fight it out for the final spot.

April

16. The Philadelphia 76ers play a regular season game in which the arena is completely empty. The television commentators leave the booth in protest early in the second quarter. The Sixers forfeit their final five home games, but refuse to refund those tickets to the 43 remaining season ticket holders. Instead, they barter with those fans, hoping to secure second round picks. Sixers GM Sam Hinkie sits down with SI’s Lee Jenkins in April, at the end of the Sixers 6-76 (fitting, isn’t it?) season. The tell-all essay is titled, “Vision 2020.” Sixers fans organize an event where they set fire to a pile of this issue of Sports Illustrated. Joel Embiid is asked to stop using Twitter by commissioner Adam Silver.

17. The Sacramento Kings win 44 games but finish 10th in the Western Conference. Owner Vivek Ranadive petitions for Sacramento to move to the Eastern Conference, but commissioner Silver stops answering Vivek’s texts. A blog is created: http://www.vivekstexts.com

18. The Memphis Grizzlies finish 6th in the West and end up taking the 3rd-seed San Antonio Spurs to Game 7, before losing the final game on two Zach Randolph missed free-throws.

May

19. After much debate, Seattle doesn’t get a franchise but they do get a new Chipotle restaurant.

20. In the middle of the Western Conference Semis between San Antonio and Oklahoma City, Kevin Durant announces he’s moving 5,000 of his closest friends and family to a newly built community outside of Oklahoma City. The rumors that he’s headed to Washington, D.C. persist anyway, because the NBA gossip bubble in the age of Twitter expands like a piece of Bubblicious.

21. The Washington Wizards and Charlotte Hornets finish 4th and 5th in the East. Paul Pierce and Lance Stephenson become involved in a staring match that lasts for 45 minutes at center court after the final buzzer of Game 1. Whichever team wins the evenly-matched series loses in 5 games to the Bulls in the East Semis.

22. The Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Clippers meet in the Western Conference Semis. Steve Kerr and Doc Rivers both agree to do color commentary and let their assistants coach during the second quarter of each game.

23. In the Eastern Conference Finals, the Chicago Bulls beat the Cleveland Cavs in 6 games. Jimmy Butler does such a ridiculous job defending Kyrie Irving (holding him to 13% shooting for the series) that he is named series MVP.

June

24. The Chicago Bulls beat the Los Angeles Clippers in the NBA Finals in 7 games. Five of the games come down to the wire. Chris Paul retires (temporarily) out of frustration. Tom Thibodeau is named MVP, due to the fact that every member of the Bulls contributes roughly the same amount to the wins, and the voting ends in a seven-way tie.

***

Tom Ziller and Michael Baumann on Tanking and the Overblown Talk of the Tank

Tom Ziller, writing for SB Nation, on fixing the NBA Draft in a simple way:

According to vast, detailed reporting by Grantland’s Zach Lowe, the NBA is keen on changing the draft lottery system to inoculate the league from the scourge of deliberately horrid basketball offered up by a handful of squads. Some massive edits are apparently on the table, fixes that would fundamentally change the NBA and how team-building works. More than fixing this specific problem — one many fans (myself included) don’t seem to mind too much — the proposed reforms would upend strategies employed by GMs over the past two or three decades.

I think we can go smaller.

There are serious but sensibly small reforms that can fix the tanking problem without causing a cascade of unintended consequences. I’ll walk through my ideas by identifying the specific problems to be fixed. But in the spirit of TL;DR, here’s the quick version:

Deflate the odds at the top of the lottery, determine more picks in the hopper and include every team in the derby.

Now, the specifics.

PROBLEM: There’s a strong incentive to lose because the NBA draft lottery rewards the worst teams.

SOLUTION: Decrease the value of those rewards.

I’m ambivalent to arguments that demand greater incentives for winning. There are plenty of incentives to win already! That’s why the vast majority of NBA teams enter the season intending to compete for the playoffs or a championship. There are way, way more teams preparing to win than designed to lose. Unfortunately, those preparations often go awry (hi, Detroit) or injuries wreak havoc (hi, Lakers).

The incentives to win are not a problem. It’s the incentives to lose that are too strong.

This is where all of the ideas come from: making the worst record in the league less valuable. This is how we get Mike Zarren’s very interesting, but problematic Wheel. (The problem: by socializing the infusion of college and international talent, existing advantages for high-revenue teams will become more important.) This is how we get the idea that the draft should be eliminated, with 20-year-olds entering the league as free agents. (The problem: teams now have an incentive to hoard cap space instead of winning now.) This is how we get the idea that all 14 lottery teams should have equal shots at No. 1 (moving the tank tipping point to the playoff fringe, which would be horrible) or that even all 30 teams should have equal shots (see above regarding socializing the infusion of college and international talent).

But there are saner, more predictable solutions. We’ll get into that after we talk about some additional problems. But the basic solution here: make that very bad record less valuable.

To read the rest of Ziller’s piece, click here: http://www.sbnation.com/2014/3/21/5532810/nba-draft-lottery-tanking-reform

Michael Baumann, of the excellent Sixers blog, Liberty Ballers, has written a unique and cerebral explanation of how Sam Hinkie has a lot in common with political theorist John Rawls. Stan Van Gundy is referred to as a “mechanism.” This is absolutely spectacular.

One of the most persistent and important questions in political theory is this: how would the most just society look?

John Rawls was a 20th Century American political philosopher who approached that question from the outside, specifically, by posing the question not to people living within the system already, but by creating theoretical constructs called the original position and the veil of ignorance. The original position is an imaginary pre-societal point at which we design the values and mechanisms of the society we will later inhabit. To prevent the future denizens of this society from each attempting to mold it to his own advantage, Rawls imposes the veil of ignorance, a constraint that prevents any one person from knowing what place in this society he will inherit.

In short, Rawls restated, in more formal language, the sentiment of “walk a mile in another man’s shoes” or “check your privilege” for the philosophy department at Harvard. The outcome of this thought experiment, Rawls suggests, is a society in which any economic or social inequality serves to benefit the least advantaged member of society, or where the worst off in relative terms will be best off in absolute terms–the maximin rule.

All of this relates to the Sixers and their approach to the forthcoming draft.

I have a problem arguing my unwavering support for the Sixers’ current course of action to people who come into the discussion with the assumption that the Sixers’ rebuild is wrong. (And if you think this is entirely about my getting defensive because I’m a Sixers fan, go find anything I’ve written about the Houston Astros in the past 18 months.) This is because the most strident critics of the Hinkie Rebuild come in with two premises I won’t grant for the purposes of argument: 1) that the goal of a team is always to win games in the short term 2) that the NBA, as a system, trends toward parity or equality.

The NBA is just like the world at large in that its 30 teams have been placed at different points on a scale of utility. The Lakers have history, wealthy ownership, a massive media market and a city that’s enticing to free agents. Teams like the Bobcats and Sixers have less enticing surroundings and the disadvantage of not even being the most popularbasketball team in their respective media markets. Even the NFL, whose hard salary cap, greater interchangeability of talent and overwhelming financial might can shoehorn even the New York Giants and the Jacksonville Jaguars into a rough state of pareto optimality, suffers these issues. If the NFL isn’t crudely egalitarian, how can we expect the NBA to be?

That necessitates controls–Zach Lowe called it “charity,” but I prefer to call it a welfare state or democratic socialism. Charity assumes social stratification and a calcified order of inequality, while the welfare state or democratic socialism is Rawls’ difference principle put to work. The best sports leagues aren’t crudely egalitarian–otherwise they’d be almost completely random–but neither should the deck be stacked so heavily in favor of the naturally advantaged that access to the ultimate goal (championships, not regular-season wins for their own sake) is practically restricted to the few.

But sometimes the mechanisms that support our society are ugly, and when they are, you’ll see waves of critics, who are either unaware of the benefit they themselves derived from such mechanisms (Stan Van Gundy), or in the camp of those who would benefit from the inequality an unrestricted system would create (Bill Simmons, more in his role as a Celtics fan than as a national columnist) decrying that ugliness and insinuating that the root cause of that ugliness is not the systemic disease of inequality, but the remedy that reduces its effect. It’s like vaccine denialism–even if vaccines did cause autism in a small number of cases, which they don’t, they still prevent smallpox, pertussis and measles in large numbers. And because we’re unable to see the larger picture, or look at the world from the original position, we forget this.

To read the rest, click here: http://www.libertyballers.com/2014/3/18/5521818/john-rawls-inequality-and-the-ethics-of-tanking-jabari-parker-andrew-wiggins-politics