Conventional wisdom held that if there was one team that might benefit from the NBA lockout, it was the Boston Celtics, for whom every missed game was one more night they would not have to run up and down those 94-foot-by-50-foot slices of NBA real estate on those 30-something legs.
Then there were the naysayers who declared that any new schedule calling for back-to-backs and even back-to-back-to-backs would be too much of a challenge for teams whose primary players were born in the 1970s.
Who among us thought there even would be a Year 4 for this core group, let alone a Year 5? There would be a three-year window for Big Three II; isn’t that what we all thought? With needed help from seasoned auxiliary players James Posey, Eddie House, and P.J. Brown, plus the rapid development of Rajon Rondo into a major point guard force, they brought home championship No. 17 in Year 1, giving local fans one of the truly great seasons in the Celtics’ storied history.
They all will take to their graves the knowledge that no other Celtics team played as consistently hard from start to finish as theirs did in 2007-08, and it’s reasonable to assume that, if asked on their deathbeds to recall the final score of the final game against the Lakers, a smile will come across each and every one of the faces as they whisper, “131-92.”
Everything about that season brings back happy memories, but it’s all every bit as much a part of Celtics history as anything accomplished by Messrs. Russell, Cousy, Havlicek, Cowens, Bird, McHale, and Parish. It’s past. It’s done. It’s over.
Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen, and Paul Pierce are still here, but time inevitably marches on, and the last time we saw them on the court, they were incapable of stopping Miami’s own Big Three when it mattered. Regular-season mastery meant nothing as LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh combined to score 164 of the Heat’s 195 points in Games 4 and 5 of a five-game Miami playoff triumph.
We need to know if Danny Ainge had a long-range plan to handle the aging of the Big Three, and if it already has been altered. He is in the same position the late Dave Gavitt was in 20 years ago, and we all know how that turned out. Larry Bird’s back went out first. Then it was Kevin McHale’s lower extremities. And that left Robert Parish, The Chief, to go it alone.
There were flashback nights for each of them, and when those nights coincided, the Celtics were still a force. But they lost to the younger Knicks in 1990, the younger Pistons in 1991, the younger Cavaliers in 1992, and the younger Hornets in 1993 before missing the playoffs in seven of the next eight years.