News that the high-falutin’ Boston Celtics tabbed Butler’s Brad Stevens as coach should have elicited a sunny response — something like, “Unassuming man who made mid-majors fashionable gets shot at biggest job in basketball.” Instead it prompted a rather darker thought, something along the lines of, “Uh, oh.”
The NBA eats college coaches alive. Lon Kruger, the only man to take five different schools to the NCAA tournament, lasted 2 1/2 seasons with the Hawks. The past two national championships were won by teams coached by John Calipari and Rick Pitino, both NBA washouts.
College basketball is about coaches. The NBA is about players. Brad Stevens has never played, coached or worked in the NBA. He’s smart enough to learn anything, but no coach is so smart he can make a bad professional team good.
The Celtics are about to become a bad team. Ray Allen left for Miami after the 2012 season. Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce are about to be traded to the Brooklyn Nets. Rajon Rondo remains, but he’s coming off surgery. It’s no wonder that Doc Rivers, one of the very best in a difficult business, split to join the Clippers, an organization long as amateurish as the Celtics are professional.
Boston already is being lumped among those no-chance teams that will spend next season angling for position in what figures to be a bountiful 2014 draft lottery. (Assuming the Hawks don’t land Dwight Howard, they could join the queue.) The Celtics apparently are willing to take the risk of getting bad to have hope of getting good again. As a concept, it makes sense. In reality, it will be even harder than it sounds.
Getting bad to get good might work in Atlanta, where the local NBA team hasn’t arrayed its rafters with championship banners and where actual sellout crowds are as rare as dodo eggs. Getting bad in Boston is a perilous undertaking. That snooty city has grown accustomed to winning big in everything, and winning big breeds impatience when you’re losing.
Pitino, who played at UMass and coached Boston U., was handed the keys to the Celtics kingdom in 1997. He was gone by 2001. He got unlucky in his first lottery and wound up not with Tim Duncan but with Chauncey Billups, on whom Pitino soured quickly, and Ron Mercer. Three years later, the Celtics were still losing and Pitino was offering his famous dismissal of the Beantown sports mentality, the one beginning with “Larry Bird is not walking through that door” and continuing as follows:
“I wish we had $90 million under the salary cap. I wish we could buy the world. We can’t. The only thing we can do is work hard, and all the negativity that’s in this town (expletive).”
Maybe Stevens will do better. Maybe his Celtics will get lottery-lucky and land Andrew Wiggins, hailed as the next LeBron James. Maybe general manager Danny Ainge’s plan will come up trumps. Maybe.
But I think of Stevens, who has never lived outside Indiana, whose job experiences have been coaching at DePauw and Butler and working as a sales rep for Eli Lilly, who’s 36 but who could pass for 16 … I think of him inheriting a rebuilding team in the most demanding sports city in these United States, and the phrase that springs to mind is a British-ism.
It will end in tears.
