Charles Barkley Has No Goddamn Idea What He's Talking About
Tell me you don't watch the Boston Celtics without telling me you don't watch the Boston Celtics.
Look, everyone knows this has been the season from hell. A mixture of unfortunate covid luck, brutal injuries and a whole bunch of player/coaching underachievement is the story of the 2020-21 Celtics season. As a result, you're going to get the "Who's to blame?" and "What's wrong in Boston" nonsense from the media. If you don't like it, win more games.
But if you're going to talk about this team, is it so hard to actually tell the truth and be accurate? I see this all the time, mostly from the trolls who fill my mentions on a daily basis. I get that might be a little hard for Chuck to do, but really there's one part that I can admit triggered me. This part right here
“Think about it — Boston had a hundred number one draft picks and they haven’t done anything with them. Now they’re irrelevant because there’s nobody in their right mind thinking, like, Boston is even close to being a contender so, like I say, you have to blame the guys.
You hear this take alllll the time about Ainge's draft picks and every time you do it continues to be incorrect. Considering I have the time, let's just go through it for the millionth time.
2014
Marcus Smart: 6th
James Young: 17th
2015:
Terry Rozier: 16th
RJ Hunter: 28th
2016
Jaylen Brown: 3rd
Yabu: 16th
Zizic: 23rd
2017
Jayson Tatum: 3rd
2018:
Robert Williams: 27th
2019:
Romeo Langford: 14th
Grant Williams: 22
Matisse Thybulle: 20 (traded)
2020:
Aaron Nesmith: 14
Payton Pritchard: 26
Desmond Bane: 30 (traded)
Let's take what Chuck said at face value, the #1 picks (I take this as their first pick in a year) since this rebuild started. I'm to believe that Marcus Smart/Terry Rozier/Jaylen Brown/Jayson Tatum/Robert Williams/Romeo Langford/Aaron Nesmith is.....nothing? To the point where you think you are making a legit argument by saying Ainge has done nothing with his picks?
Of course, just like with EVERY GM IN THE NBA, there are some bad misses. The Young pick, the Yabu pick, Zizic, etc, those exist. Maybe you want to throw Grant in there as well, fine by me. But look at the list of names I gave you that were the Celts "first" pick. I see a 2x All NBA defender, a starting caliber PG, two All Stars where one of them is an All NBA player, a starting caliber center and then two young wings with promise. It's just hard to be more wrong when anyone suggests that Ainge did not do anything with his picks. You're just exposing yourself for not having a clue of what you're talking about.
Now, should Ainge maybe have packaged some of those later first round picks for more proven rotational talent to help right away? Sure, but that's not the argument here.
Then we move to his argument about being a "contender". I'm sorry, what exactly does that even mean? I consider a contender a team that contends for a Finals/title. To do that, you have to ya know, make the final four, something this team has done repeatedly. Now because of a weird covid year they are suddenly not "contenders"? What makes someone like MIL/PHI contenders despite them having almost no postseason success? It's just not very consistent. How can a team that was just contending for a Finals appearance like 8 months ago all of the sudden not even be close to a contender when their best players and core of that team are in their low 20s? Because they had one down season in which their top 7 played 0 games together?
Maybe this is just Chuck's Sixers loyalty taking over, who knows. It's not exactly a surprise to hear him talk this way if you watch Inside The NBA on a regular basis. You can always tell when someone doesn't really watch when their main talking points are what Chuck went with in that clip.
There are a million things you can legitimately criticize the Celts for as reasons for why they are where they are. Why Chuck went this route just shows me he has no clue what those things are because he doesn't watch.