Dumars On Boston Trade: "Wow" <div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">Kevin Garnett in Celtics green makes the job of Boston’s sales staff a much easier proposition. Less certain is what it does for the job confronting Celtics coach Doc Rivers. Boston’s going to lead the league in buzz – at least until the bullets start flying for real. The Garnett trade on the heels of the Ray Allen draft-day deal gives Boston perhaps the league’s most potent threesome in combination with holdover Paul Pierce. Which is wonderful if David Stern unilaterally declares the NBA is adopting Gus Macker rules and going to a 3-on-3 format. I think I’d still take Phoenix’s trio of Steve Nash, Amare Stoudemire and Shawn Marion, mostly due to Nash’s ability to produce easy baskets for those around him. The Celtics’ percentage of “SportsCenter” air time is going to spike dramatically next winter, I suspect, largely because Pierce and Allen and Garnett are highlight-reel players – and also because without a proven point guard on the roster, they’re going to have to string together highlight-reel moves to score in significant numbers. Joe Dumars shook his head at the enormity of the Minnesota-Boston trade and the assorted astounding facts that spin out around it the other day after he spoke about re-signing Chauncey Billups prior to Billups’ charity golf outing at Birmingham Country Club. How do you put a team together when three players account for nearly 100 percent of the salary cap? How will three superstars, all of them accustomed to taking nearly every big shot, function side by side by side? Who volunteers to sublimate his ego first? And how is chemistry affected afterward? Even in an Eastern Conference without an overwhelming favorite, is a team that figures to start two players (Kendrick Perkins, Rajon Rondo) who’ve never even ascended to significant reserve status to be taken seriously? “Wow,” Dumars said as he considered the ramifications. “Wow.” As we’ve seen before with teams that choose to rid themselves of veterans and rebuild around young players and draft choices – Chicago, post-Jordan, the ultimate cautionary tale – it most often is a painful and uncertain process. Danny Ainge rolled the dice on high school players like Al Jefferson, Kendrick Perkins, Sebastian Telfair and Gerald Green, but lost his stomach for the youth movement and has now gone all in for a team that might have a three-year window and has very little chance to add the two or three obvious missing pieces – frontcourt size and depth, a rangy and athletic wing player who can defend, a proven point guard – unless he can convince solid veterans to sign below-market contracts on the appeal of playing with his new big three. I’m tempted to say Ainge is holding three aces and a bunch of jokers, but that’s not quite right. It’s really one ace (Garnett), two kings (or jacks, perhaps) and a bunch of deuces and treys. There is no middle class on the Celtics. After paying CEO salaries to Garnett, Allen and Pierce – all 30-plus, the former with 12 years of tread gone from his tires, the latter two with injury histories – the Celtics can’t afford blue-collar salaries, instead reduced to hiring itinerant help for middle-management positions. And consider this: Because expectations are going to be enormous in Boston, exacerbated by pent-up demand from a fan base that still measures success in championship banners, Rivers, who has job security issues of his own, is going to be sorely tempted to play his three stars 40-plus minutes a night – the dropoff to their reserves is going to be so severe as to risk inducing the bends. What it more likely will risk is catastrophic injury. It’s going to be entertaining, for certain. Fans in 29 NBA cities who would have yawned at seeing Boston pop up on the schedule before are going to be circling Celtics visits in red now. Honchos at ESPN and TNT are scrambling to expand Boston’s visibility quotient. It surely comes as good news to the NBA that Boston, after nearly 20 years of irrelevance in one of the league’s nerve centers, is suddenly going to matter again. How much, we’re still not sure. And for how long, even less certain.</div> Source: Pistons.com
I agree. They all take A LOT of shots. To see them work together, is gonna be interesting. You can tell Joe D doesn't like a bunch of superstars on a team. Look at the Pistons.....
