13 Things I Learned From the Celtics Championship
Europeans are weenies. The play of Gasol, Vujacic and Rachmoninov was softer than John Tomase's muffin tops. Collectively they played like the kind of worthless, slimy Eurotrash that only gets aggressive with drunken American tourist chicks. They showed all the willingness to help out defensively that their countries showed in Bosnia. Pau Borat set a new Guinness record as World's Smallest 7-footer and the only hit Vaginacic dished out was to the water boy who tried to interrupt his tears. They were like the Swedes Don Cherry always talks about, demonstrating the NBA equivalent of being unwilling to go into the corners.
Tim Donaghy deserves a ring. David Stern has bided his time like a State Pen lifer through 22 years of Spurs-Pistons Finals waiting for a series like this to come along. Do you think there's any way this Finals wouldn't have gone seven games if Donaghy hadn't told the world what we already knew: that the league, through the refs, manipulates the playoffs to get maximum exposure?
9 o'clock starts are an abombination. It's not like I get up to milk the cows or can't go into work knowing I'm tired and they're not getting my best effort, but the NBA is committing fiscal suicide having every game end after midnight. My kids entire school saw as many minutes of Finals basketball as they've seen of "There Will Be Cum" on Comcast On Demand.
John Dennis is an ignorant blowhard. Where's your "Danny Panic" talk now?
Parking Attendant Guy must die. If the guy at the parking garage was that insufferable, I'd catch his arm in the power window and slam him into the Jersey barriers.
Paul Pierce had to be the MVP. After Game 4, you could've made a strong case for Ray Allen, but Pierce was going to win it no matter what, if for no other reason than as an Irving J. Thalberg Lifetime Achievement Award for 10 years of putting up with the (mostly) buffoonery around him. As it was, he was the best player on both teams, both ends of the court.
The MVP trophy sucks. Granted we haven't seen one in Boston in a long time, but when did they start giving out a trophy that looks just like the MTV Movie Award?
You can hit 3-pointers with one eye. I'm obviously glad Allen is OK, but you have to admit he would've looked like a total badass in an eyepatch.
Boston sports columnists are consistently horrible. The sudden success of the Celtics left the sportswriters completely unprepared. Buckley, Masseroti and especially Shaughnessy have ignored the Celts, and basketball in general, for years, and were utterly incapable of writing intelligently about them now. Shank's interview with Red's statue and last Sunday's look back at the '80'... among the worst of a career spent writing worthless drivel... were a result of the fact that he'd been ignoring the Celts throughout all the Sherman Douglas/ Ricky Davis/ Wally Szerbiak years. The exception among the columnists was Bob Ryan, who could be the best writer of hoops, college or pro, in the country.
Coaching in the NBA is simple. It's easy to praise Doc and dump on the Zen Master... Lord knows I have... but when you hear their locker room speeches or them talking in the huddle, what they say is no more complicated than what I told my team coaching of 9 year olds. "Take good shots. Box out. Look for the open man." You certainly never heard anything as clever or inspired as "We're gonna run the picket fence on 'em. And don't get caught watching the paint dry."
The Celtics needed to learn how to play together in the playoffs. We've always heard "playoff basketball is different." (At least we heard it from teams who actually made the playoffs.) And obviously it's true. The C's learned how to play as a unit on the backyard court at the Vatican, and played that way all season. But it IS a different game in the playoffs and it took them getting the Atlanta series and the Cleveland series under their waistbands to learn how to adjust and work together. Like the 2007 Red Sox, they were the best team all season but still played to perfection at the very end.
The "New" Garden is not a mausoleum. Funny how loud a crowd can get when they've got something more to cheer for than Vin Baker.
Boston fans are not racist. I'm not aware of anyone in town disappointed that Brian Scalabrine wasn't part of the equation. Nor did I catch anyone gazing longingly at the Europuds and dreaming of how great they'd look in green.