Reminders of Celtics’ lousy lottery luck are hard to miss — but that’s not necessarily a bad thing
The cruel bounces of the ping-pong balls have cost the Celtics chances at Tim Duncan and Kevin Durant. Yet, there has been recent history to savor.
COMMENTARY
I’m not proud of it, but I’ll admit it because, if you follow the Celtics and woke up this morning as nervous as you’d be for a Game 7 in June, I know you can relate:
I was kind of hoping Tim Duncan would retire over the past few days.
Not because of some desire to be rid of the sui generis, stoic, bank-shot sinking Spurs big man, mind you. The league is better and more diverse in talent and personality when he’s a part of it. I know that. He’s not what he was, but he’s still savvy and capable and deftly utilizing the glass, and I’m sure the Spurs would love to have him back for a 20th season.
But this is the kind of stuff that rattles around in your mind, the kind of tangled nonsense that suddenly starts making some sense when you’ve spent so much time pondering this truth:
A significant chunk of the Celtics’ future is dependent upon the bouncing whims of a bunch of bleepin’ ping-pong balls tonight. Not strategy or acumen or basketball smarts. Ping-pong balls. Balls used for ping-pong. Those silly plastic balls determine the future of basketball.
Whether the Celtics end up with a top-two pick – and presumably, Ben Simmons or Brandon Ingram, the former being my far-and-away favorite – is utterly beyond their control. They’re banking on the bounces.
It’s exasperating, especially given the franchise’s rotten luck in such similar past scenarios, and so you do the natural thing. Irrationally, you start looking for ways to control the uncontrollable.
Which is where my Retire Now, Duncan plea/theory comes in. In matters based on luck and odds like the draft lottery, anything that might even slightly foreshadow a fortunate break is welcome. Duncan, as any Celtics fan worth his Nate Driggers rookie card knows, is the starkest reminder of a draft lottery gone wrong.
In the ’97 lottery, the Celtics, coming off a 15-win season, had two of the top six picks and a 28-percent chance at landing the No. 1 overall choice – which beyond dispute was the Wake Forest product Duncan, presumed correctly to be the NBA’s next great big man.
For some reason, we presumed around here that 28 percent was close to a sure thing – hell, Rick Pitino took the job as Celtics coach largely because of the belief they would get Duncan. The odds were against them, and so were the bounces.
The 72 percent prevailed. The Celtics did not win the lottery. They ended up with the “backcourt of the future” instead: Chauncey Billups and Ron Mercer. They were both elsewhere within a year and a half. Pitino quit during his fourth season, done in by the cruel lottery as much as his own considerable hubris.
The casual daydream that Duncan – who hasn’t announced whether he will play next season – would call it a career this week stems from that experience. If he’s gone, perhaps that would signify that the Celtics’ lousy lottery luck that traces back to him is gone, too.
I know. It’s a cockamamie theory, at best. It’s ridiculous, insane even, to think that it might have any effect beyond some sort of poetic justice. And yet … Isaiah Thomas, who is representing the Celtics at the lottery, has said – has admitted publicly – that he will wear green underwear to this thing. Anything to catch karma’s attention, to get on its good side, simply must be done. It’s what we do.
If Isaiah is upping his underwear game, I don’t even want to know what Tommy Heinsohn did for luck when he repped the Celtics at the 2007 lottery, when their 19.9 percent chance at the top pick – presumably Kevin Durant, though Greg Oden went first – went bust.
Durant, coveted by the Celtics as a pending free-agent but currently preoccupied with helping the Thunder try to dethrone the Warriors in the Western Conference Finals, is another reminder of a lottery gone wrong. But perhaps as we anticipate how things will go down Tuesday night when the ping-pong balls settle, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver stares awkwardly at the camera, and the fates are revealed, it’s best to remember that certain cherished good times never would have happened if not for the lottery disappointments.
Sure, it would have been wonderful to have Duncan here the past 19 years. He’s one of the league’s great winners, with five titles in San Antonio, and perhaps there would be more company for those championship banners in the rafters had he ended up here.
But it’s surprisingly easy to rationalize why it’s OK that he never became a Celtic in the first place.
I doubt he would have remained here for the entirety of his career like he did in San Antonio. The St. Croix kid was not keen on coming to Boston’s cold weather. I suspect that desired super-team in Orlando – Grant Hill, Tracy McGrady, and Duncan – might have actually happened had his career begun here. Then again, maybe he would have loved playing with Antoine Walker.
Had the Celtics won the right to draft Duncan, it’s likely that we’d never have come to know and admire Paul Pierce – the quintessential tough, stubborn Boston athlete – as one of our own. Had they won the right to draft Durant, it’s likely that Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett never wear green and white. Banner 17 might dangle from the rafters still. But it would have been a different assemblage of players to put it there. I’m proud of the ones who did, and would hate to have missed out on them. It could have been Duncan and Bill Russell on this cover. I like how it turned out, you know?
I’m not sure I would have traded what actually happened with the Celtics for what might have been with Duncan or Durant. I don’t want to trade the memories we already do have, the memories of anything being possible. But I know this today: The Celtics have had to come up with enough Plan Bs through the years when the ping-pong balls refused to cooperate. I’m ready to see what happens when the bounces do go the Celtics way.
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