Celtics hope for best in NBA draft lottery, even though more ping-pong torture is inevitable
COMMENTARY
The one problem with the Boston Celtics sending Isaiah Thomas to Tuesday’s NBA Draft Lottery is that the viewing audience might be denied another defining moment of frustration in the team’s inevitable slip on the icy luck of the draw.
Thomas will smile politely when the Celtics wind up with the No. 5 pick in the upcoming NBA Draft, not likely to display the sort of raw emotion and muffled expletives that Tommy Heinsohn delivered in 2007, when then-NBA Commissioner David Stern’s ping-pong charade denied Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge his first chance at Kevin Durant. (Or, you know, Greg Oden, but why needlessly travel down that road?)
Two years ago, Celtics owner Steve Pagliuca was left seemingly muttering niceties to himself, like Homer Simpson watching the pig soar over Springfield, when the Celtics fell down a spot and received the No. 6 pick in the 2014 NBA Draft. It’s just a little airborne. It’s still good. It’s still good.
It was. It is. The Celtics ended up with Marcus Smart, who is either the closest approximation that Boston has of a Montreal Canadien, or the the league’s next James Harden or Paul George, depending on which side of the coin you figure the 21-year-old might eventually land.
And the fact that the Celtics could have ended up with Joel Embiid…shivers.
So, it’s not like the NBA draft lottery has been completely unfair to the Boston Celtics (except 1997, which was an atrocity), who managed to use their misfortune in 2007 to build a championship team. But every draft also presents a different narrative.
This year, it’s the drop off after top prospects Ben Simmons and Brandon Ingram that has Celtics fans hoping Boston has a little more fortune this time around, dreaming that the 15.6 percent chance of it landing the No. 1 pick is more of a reality than some might give it credit.
But it won’t happen.
The Celtics, comfortably slotted in the No. 3 spot thanks to the Brooklyn Nets’ ineptness over the past year, currently have the best chance of landing the No. 5 pick (26.5 percent), followed by the No. 4 pick (22.6 percent). Going in the top three is pretty much even money, and even though they can’t pick lower than sixth, there’s only a four percent chance they’ll manage to reach the basement.
Based on the way this thing has gone for them over the years though, No. 6 seems a hell of a lot more likely than No. 1 or 2 does.
In the likelihood that the Celtics wind up with the fifth or sixth pick, they’ll presumably draft a player, seeing as how enticing another team for a veteran presence with the No. 5 pick in a weak draft won’t do much, even for a front office magician like Ainge.
Based on the limited amount of NBA mock drafts populating the Internet that could mean a promising guy like Oklahoma’s Buddy Hield or maybe even Providence’s Kris Dunn. CBS Sports’ Sam Vecenie has them taking Jakob Poeltl with the No. 4 pick, a guy that Sports Illustrated’s Andrew Sharp didn’t have moving until pick No. 10. So, whatever.
This is why, more so than the unclear path for both, there isn’t a lot of debate in Boston these days between Simmons and Ingram. Keep in mind, if the Celtics intend on attracting Durant to Boston as a free agent in the summer (that Rondo-Kevin Love day at Fenway didn’t go so well, eh?), it’s not likely that the current crop of players and a kid, even the level of talent as Ingram — who now seems to have wrested the consensus No. 1 from Simmons — is going to sell him on the opportunity he simply can’t pass up. That pick, if by some chance it lands in the top two slots, is more than likely gone elsewhere.
Except, you already understand that’s not going to happen.
No, the Celtics will slide down in the draft and end up with Jaylen Brown or Jamal Murray or Dragen Bender, a nice sidepiece to add to what was a thoroughly enjoyable Celtics squad during the 2015-16 season, but one that was also drastically overrated by the local fandom. Oh, sure, they beat the Golden State Warriors. On the road. Neat.
A few weeks later they proved they were still more of a work in progress than a team on the doorstep of anything during their first-round playoff loss to the Atlanta Hawks.
Yet the team and its fans await Tuesday with the aspiration that maybe, just maybe, things will go their way this time.
“This offseason is bigger,” Ainge said last week. “My expectations are high this offseason, and yet I also know that it takes good fortune. We need the ping-pong balls to bounce our way to give us the best opportunity, whether we use that pick or whether we trade that pick.”
On Tuesday, that debate may begin.
But who’s really going to surrender something valuable for the fifth pick anyway?
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