We might not have to tank. We'll be terrible. Celtics win record in 13-14?

[chambers]

PLEASE VOTE ON THE NOTION THAT WE ARE NOT SIGNING ANY FREE AGENTS OR MAKING ANY FURTHER MAJOR TRADES THIS OFF SEASON. THIS IS ASSUMING THE ROSTER IS LEFT AS IT IS FOR THE 2013-14 SEASON. THANKS!

I'll be honest and say I'm in favor of tanking next season. I've always thought if we'd be bad then just make it really bad to have the best gamblers chance of binking a franchise guy in the draft.

Danny Ainge, when asked if the Celtics were tanking today said
"We are not tanking," Ainge told the Globe. "That's ridiculous. This is the Boston Celtics."

Never trust Danny Ainge.lol. But wait, he may be telling the truth. We're not going to purposely lose games. We're going to lose because we are terrible.

Looking at our 2013-14 roster, I'm having second thoughts about the need to 'tank' on purpose. I can't see us ending up with anything worse than a top 10 pick, more likely inside the top 6 to 8 picks.

Lets break this down logically.

Defense

* If we look at our own team last year, without Garnett's defensive impact on the floor, we'll probably be a bottom 5 defense. Green, Bradley and Rondo are all great defenders but our paint protection will be very poor.

* Kelly Olnyk, Colton Iverson and Jarred Sullinger defending the best bigs in the NBA for a season probably won't work out too well either way. We may keep Bass but even with him we are giving up a tonne of points in the paint without much inside production.

Remember our plus/ minus with KG on and off the floor last season? Now imagine the minus, with KG never stepping onto the court. Ever. With no replacement that even resembles a rim protector.
Missing out on DeAndre Jordan may have been a blessing in disguise because at leas he has some idea of protecting the rim.
Don't worry Olnyk and Fab Melo will put up their hands!

Offense

* With Pierce gone we'll be relying on scoring of Rondo, Green, Avery and Sully. Teams will pretty much just clog the lane and make us shoot. I don't like our chances with Rondo and Bradley shooting even more jump shots than usual.
* I'm assuming Wallace comes off the bench with Bass. That's if we don't waive Wallace early and move Bass. Maybe 15-25 points from them combined?
* No Pierce, no Terry. No three point shooting other than Jeff Green, Courtney Lee and maybe Olnyk?
Starting to get the picture here?

The Competition gets slightly better overall

* I'm looking at the worst 10 teams from 2013 and we are going to have trouble scoring and defending even the poorest teams like the Kings, the Bobcats, the Pelicans, Detroit- let alone teams like the Cavs, Bucks, Wizards.
Most of those teams started rebuilding 2-3 seasons ago now have young, athletic rosters. I mean the Wizards, Cavs and Pelicans will be alright. I don't think it's a stretch to say we could get swept in each season series with them.

*Even teams like the Raptors have Rudy Gay and are trying to win now.
*Teams that are professionally tanking like Orlando are where we get most of our wins but who's that much worse than us? Even with Vucevic inside the Magic are a close game- how do we stop him getting 20 points and 15 rebounds even with Sully out there for 30 minutes?

*realistically we are favorites over the Bobcats, Magic, Kings and the 76ers. After what we've lost and what the other rebuilding teams have gained are there really any others?

eg: What if the Bobcats with Kemba, Kidd Gilchrist, Biyombo, Zeller, Henderson decide to add Al Jefferson? (he's meeting with them as we speak apparently).

*Last season we didn't have Rondo which obviously affected our record but it seems highly unlikely we get over a .300 record with KG and Pierce both gone.

* Even with Rondo playing his heart out, he's not defending the paint or making up for our lack of shooting and inside scoring.

Is it safe to say at most a 0.350 record of 25-35 wins out of 82 games for the Celtics next season? Pretty much winning one out of 3 games?
An injury to Green, Rondo or Sully takes that down another 5 wins.

Either way, as long as Danny decides he doesn't want to overpay anyone this off season and doesn't make any more major trade moves- I have a question.

Are we pretty much a bottom 6 team anyway?

[SparzWizard]

36-win team.

Maybe sneak into the playoffs as the 8th seed and get ousted by the Miami Heat in round 1.

[LarBrd33]

Yeah just to clarify.  The players will not be tanking.  The players will give it their all when they are in the game.

The Celtics players aren't tanking.

Danny Ainge is tanking.  Big difference.  If he wanted to, he could put together a competitive playoff caliber 35-45 win team.  Shoot, if he wanted to he could have just kept everyone together and we'd limp into the playoffs with another 41 game season. 

But that's not the plan.  The plan is to load this team with unproven, raw, young talent and future draft picks... grows them up like lil bloomin flowers, and then either build your garden around them... or trade em at the farmer's market for some roasted garlic hummus.   

Same thing in 2007.  It's not like Big Al, Rondo, Gerald, Delonte, etc weren't trying to win... they just didn't have enough talent to get it done.  There were some sketchy late-game decisions late in the season where Doc benched our savvy players for raw talent, but it was defensible as "developing the young guys in crunch time".  Pierce claimed he would have played more of that season had the team been playing for a purpose... so those tiny things can be interpreted as "tanking", but Boston would never admit "we threw games".  They weren't throwing games... bricking shots on purpose and turning the ball over.  They just sucked.

The 2013-14 Celtics will suck by design.  And it's a glorious thing.  We plowed the field and are starting to plant the seeds.  Our future is full of roasted garlic hummus.

[gpap]

Why don't we see first how the opening night roster looks before rushing to conclusions about how "awful" we are going to be?

Also, just a note about how our offense will supposedly lack without Pierce and Terry:

Pierce and Terry were both very inconsistent last season, offensively (see the Knicks series.)

[BballTim]

Why don't we see first how the opening night roster looks before rushing to conclusions about how "awful" we are going to be?

  That's just crazy talk.

[PhoSita]

Our future is full of roasted garlic hummus.

You're really trying to cultivate a distinct persona on here post-tank, huh?

[gpap]

Why don't we see first how the opening night roster looks before rushing to conclusions about how "awful" we are going to be?

  That's just crazy talk.

Lol! Personally, I am kinda excited to see what direction this team now takes.

Of course it's sad to see your star players gone, but with that comes the fun of seeing where we go next.

[chambers]

36-win team.

Maybe sneak into the playoffs as the 8th seed and get ousted by the Miami Heat in round 1.

I think that's being very generous. Speaking of the terrible Bucks, how do we stop Ilyasova and Larry Sanders?

What I mean is that we will go from having a top 5 defense in the NBA to a bottom 5 defense. That's how important KG is.
Combine that with our lack of jump shooting and three point shooting will be. Bass, Green and Gerald Wallace will be our best jumpshooters. Hmmmmmm.

36 wins is winning only 5 less games than last year with KG and Pierce, Terry and Doc. We lose KG's rebounding. We lose his rim protection, his defense on starting NBA 7 footers and replace is with a rookie. We lose Pierce's 3 point shooting, his 16 ppg and 5 assists.

Green might average 20 and 5 but who else is scoring more than 16 ppg with teams clogging the paint against us and abusing us inside on the other end?

[rondoallaturca]

30-32 wins is our cap even with Rondo.

[kgainez]

like honestly, how many of these threads are we gonna have?

[chambers]

Why don't we see first how the opening night roster looks before rushing to conclusions about how "awful" we are going to be?

Also, just a note about how our offense will supposedly lack without Pierce and Terry:

Pierce and Terry were both very inconsistent last season, offensively (see the Knicks series.)

Pierce was inconsistent in the playoffs. But don't worry about the playoffs. We don't have a chance of making the playoffs.

Remember that Pierce had better stats than Luol Deng and Paul George and probably should have been selected as an All Star. His All Star level play kept us at .500 basketball. That's WITH Kevin Garnett on the floor and directing our defense.

We just lost both. We have a reasonable replacement for Pierce in Green, but we have absolutely nothing that resembles Kevin Garnett. Just imagine last year without KG and Rondo and just Pierce.

Now imagine this year with Rondo and Jeff Green with no KG.

Gulp.

[chambers]

like honestly, how many of these threads are we gonna have?

Haven't seen any that question how terrible we'll be since the Nets trade and now it appears we aren't even looking at free agents.
Seems like we have a pretty good idea of what the roster will basically look like and how bad we really will be.

I think it's interesting discussion because it appears the moment has arrived where we've realized we'll be a very poor team.

[badshar]

This is from Wikipedia about NBA Draft Lottery:

Starting from 1987, the NBA modified the lottery system so that only the first three picks were determined by the lottery. After the three envelopes were drawn, the remaining non-playoff teams would select in reverse order of their win-loss record. This meant that the team with the worst record could receive no worse than the fourth selection, the second-worst team could pick no lower than fifth, and so on.

In 2007, we were the second-worst team and got the fifth pick, so this data is correct.

If we are going to tank, we must make sure we are the worst team. Not the second worst team.

[lightspeed5]

tank doesnt mean lose on purpose. it means creating a team that probably wont have a great win-loss record.

[gpap]

Why don't we see first how the opening night roster looks before rushing to conclusions about how "awful" we are going to be?

Also, just a note about how our offense will supposedly lack without Pierce and Terry:

Pierce and Terry were both very inconsistent last season, offensively (see the Knicks series.)

Pierce was inconsistent in the playoffs. But don't worry about the playoffs. We don't have a chance of making the playoffs.

Remember that Pierce had better stats than Luol Deng and Paul George and probably should have been selected as an All Star. His All Star level play kept us at .500 basketball. That's WITH Kevin Garnett on the floor and directing our defense.

We just lost both. We have a reasonable replacement for Pierce in Green, but we have absolutely nothing that resembles Kevin Garnett. Just imagine last year without KG and Rondo and just Pierce.

Now imagine this year with Rondo and Jeff Green with no KG.

Gulp.

What if the Celts pick up Josh Smith? I think Smith would definitely be able to replace KG's production. That's why I say, wait til October to see how the roster looks.

Also remember, there was a reason why Ainge dealt Pierce and KG.

Hall of Fame players, but their clock ran out.