No. I have very little desire to lose 55+ games again.
But you'd rather win 45-55 and get beaten in the 2nd round again?
I guess I can appreciate where you're coming from, but to me any season that puts us farther away from being a contender instead of bringing us closer to being one is a waste of a season.
There's no trophy for making the playoffs or winning a single series, and you can't build a championship contender with late first round picks.
First, at least in the short term, the Celtics have as much of a chance of winning as anybody else. Despite being decimated by injuries and getting no contribution from their sixth man, they've been competitive with Miami in just about every game. There may be a gap between Miami and Boston, but it's not a wide one. I'd hate to see us rebuild next year, and then have Miami stumble due to an injury to one of their stars. Right now, we're still one of the top five teams in the NBA.
Second, rebuilding usually doesn't work. The Bulls tried it, and it took them over a decade to be relevant again. Even after the Celtics original Big Three moved on, the team didn't see success for almost two decades, and that was after two rebuilding efforts. There are a ton of teams who are stuck in rebuilding right now, and I guarantee that just about every one of them would prefer to switch places with the Celts.
If we blow the team up, we'll be lucky to be a competitive team again within five seasons, and even in that scenario it's likely that a second round playoff loss would be seen as a success. That being the case, I'd prefer to keep our team together, and hope to catch lightning in a bottle. Simply put, being in the lottery is overrated.
I respect that attitude, but as I said before, I disagree. I agree that rebuilding is a crap shoot and it takes a lot of luck to "win" the lottery ('win' meaning getting an above average player). However, it's the only system the team has to work with, and the system necessitates that you get a lot worse before you can realistically get better.
I disagree that there's a realistic chance for this group to win another title. The options for improving the team really at all this summer are extremely limited outside of some unseen wild trade (which would constitute blowing the team up to some degree). As currently constituted, this group is too old to sustain a playoff run against the younger and steadily more talented contenders in the East. They aren't going to have a better seed next year than last; without any productive young role players there won't be any kind of Spursian Renaissance here.
Basically, I believe the writing is on the wall. I think if there's interest in having 1 or 2, maybe even 3 more 40-50 win seasons and a fighting chance at winning a playoff series, then keeping this group together could accomplish that. But that's all that's going to be accomplished. I realize that winning a playoff series may seem like a big deal a couple years down the road once rebuilding is well underway. Still, winning a single playoff series doesn't particularly excite me; even wins against higher seeds led by players I hate will be fleeting. Honestly, nobody remembers the 5th seed that knocked off the 4th seed and took the 1 seed to 6 games.
In light of that, any season that brings us further away from a title instead of closer to one is a waste, in my opinion. The only way to get closer to a title instead of drifting further away from one is to start rebuilding. This group has had it's time, and now that time has passed.
No. I have very little desire to lose 55+ games again.
But you'd rather win 45-55 and get beaten in the 2nd round again?
I guess I can appreciate where you're coming from, but to me any season that puts us farther away from being a contender instead of bringing us closer to being one is a waste of a season.
There's no trophy for making the playoffs or winning a single series, and you can't build a championship contender with late first round picks.
Becoming a crappy team doesn't put you closer to being a contender. You're implying that teams like Minny, Sacramento, Toronto and Golden State are closer to being contenders than Portland or Atlanta. I don't see this as true.
Even if you feel that we have no hope of ever beating the Heat, how would you feel about things if we broke things up and won 33 games next year, Chicago fizzled in the playoffs and LeBron gets injured? Would you be thankful that we're "closer to contending" than looking at a relatively easy path to the finals?
No, I'm not implying what you said I implied. Portland and Atlanta are young; there are still moves they can make to shift the make-up of their team and contend. They aren't a whole lot closer to winning a title than Sactown and Golden State, but they are. However, I would say at this point that Golden State and Sactown are probably closer to winning a title than the Celtics. Becoming a crappy team
does make you closer to a title if you are a young crappy team filled with players that have potential and there are draft picks stockpiled.
One thing you can be pretty sure of is that the Celtics will not be as poorly managed as the Warriors, T-Wolves, Raptors, and Kings have been these past few years. The Celtics also have a lot more money than those teams. You can be assured that the Celtics rebuilding process should be considerably less painful.
The scenario you detailed is extremely unlikely, but even if it were to happen, I imagine that there will be at least one or two other teams in the East that will be in a better position next year (e.g. the Hawks will probably have surpassed us). There's also the West. I don't see the Thunder, Grizzlies, Mavs, Blazers etc. all suffering some major injuries and posing no threat.
Unless next season is roughly 20-30 games long, just long enough to get warmed up for the playoffs and not long enough for anybody to get hurt / tired, the Celtics aren't going to be in the running for anything more than a 2nd round exit, or maybe a trip to the eastern conference finals if others teams face terrible luck.
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