Moneyball, Dr. Phil, and Danny Ainge's risky strategy,
The Celtics had been bad the previous season, 24-58 bad, but they had hope in the form of the upcoming draft, where two potential franchise players—Greg Oden and Kevin Durant—were waiting. Their plans were tied to the draft lottery, held a month before the actual draft, during which numbers are drawn to determine the order of the first 14 picks. Thanks to their terrible record, the Celtics had the second-best chance of winning the top draft pick. They got the fifth. That disappointment gave way to a bold new strategy. The team would scrap the youth movement that had been under way since the 2005 season and try to pull off not one, but two blockbuster trades. They made the first, for Allen, on the day of the draft. For the second, the Celtics pursued a number of big-name players including Jason Kidd, Shawn Marion, and Gasol, then of Memphis. But all along they were really focused on Garnett. "We had plans A, B, C, and D," says Steve Pagliuca, the team's general partner. "But getting KG was plan A-plus."
The Celtics were taking a big risk, both financially and on the court. To add Garnett and Allen, they had to trade away almost half their roster and take on more than $130 million in contracts for two players in their thirties, i.e., past their prime. Garnett's and Allen's salaries just for last season, combined with Pierce's, totaled $56 million, pushing the Celtics over the salary cap. To complete the roster with veteran free agents, the Celtics had to go into the luxury tax bracket, which demands a dollar-for-dollar penalty. With a final payroll of over $76 million, the Celtics were paying an extra $8.2 million in those luxury taxes, which even in the NBA isn't chump change.
And then, of course, there was no guarantee that having three stars on the same roster would actually work. NBA history is filled with attempts to create superteams, almost all of which have crashed and burned in a dysfunctional mess of conflicting egos and agendas. The most recent example came in 2004, when the Lakers added Gary Payton and Karl Malone to a lineup that already had Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. The Hall of Fame foursome were good enough to get to the NBA Finals—whereupon they self-destructed against Billups's Pistons, Payton bitching about his playing time and Shaq and Kobe bitching about each other.
Accordingly, from the beginning, there were doubts in Boston. Two days after the trade, the Globe's Bob Ryan wrote, "That's it? Someone actually thinks this Celtics team will win the East and contend for the championship? Really?" (In fairness, this was before the team had signed James Posey, who would prove to be a critical role player—but then, no one was planning a parade route after he signed, either.)
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NBA superstars are traditionally judged by two criteria, scoring and championships, and the perception is that one feeds directly into the other. Blame it on Michael Jordan. In our mind's eye we will always see Jordan with the ball in his hands at the end of the game—he knows he's taking the shot, his defender knows it, everyone in the freakin' arena knows it, and we all know it's going in. That's greatness defined in the NBA. It's also "not Garnett's game," notes Britt Robson, a Minnesota journalist and longtime Garnett observer. "Some people resent that. They see it as cowardice. They won't say it that straight, but that's what they're implying."
Garnett stands nearly 7 feet tall (he swears that he is 6 foot 11¾), meaning that by all rights he should play center. But he has always steadfastly rejected that categorization. Think about the game's great centers and you think of their go-to moves: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's skyhook, Hakeem Olajuwon's "Dream Shake." Garnett's moves, by contrast, have no name. His repertoire, heavy on 20-foot jump shots and turnaround fadeaways, is more usual for a guard than a big man. It's also uncannily effective.
... by playing outside, Garnett drew attention away from the basket, which for the Celtics meant that Pierce and Rajon Rondo were freed up to attack the rim. It also allowed center Kendrick Perkins to occupy the lane, which left him open for dunks and lay-ups when his defender would inevitably leave him to help cover a slashing Rondo or Pierce. (Perkins made 61 percent of his shots last season.) Garnett is also a deft passer from the high post, and frequently connected with Allen when he came off screens for open three-pointers. Every member of last season's starting five had higher offensive ratings than their career averages, and all but Allen had higher shooting percentages (and he was just 1/100th off his career mark). No one benefited more than Pierce. The Celtics captain set a career high in offensive rating while posting the lowest usage percentage since his second season in the NBA. Put simply, Pierce had less to do, and that meant he did everything better.
The offensive system Garnett enabled the Celtics to run had two primary benefits: It kept players happy, since it got everyone involved, and it made it possible for the team to focus its energies on defense. By the traditional measure—points allowed—the Celtics played the second-best defense in the league last year. But it was even better than that. Hollinger determined that their team defensive rating was almost eight points better than the league average, ranking them the third-best defense in the NBA since the modern box score was implemented in 1974. More impressive, they became a great defensive team after being among the league's worst the previous season. "To put everything together and do it in one year is really amazing," says Kevin Pelton, a writer for the website Basketball Prospectus. Pelton's stats show that the Celtics were the best in the league at defending shooters (the official term, for those taking notes, is "effective field goal percentage defense") and forcing turnovers. They played solid straight-up defense and still were able to gamble for steals. According to Pelton, no team has ever led the league in both categories.
The architect of the Celtics team defense is associate coach Tom Thibodeau, another new addition last season. The scheme relies on constant communication and aggressively switching assignments. In Garnett—who never stops talking, and can shut down any player—he had the ultimate individual weapon to build around. "Kevin sold our team defense," Rivers says. "We give a lot of credit to the coaches, but let's be honest: Without Kevin, it doesn't work."
Garnett was the landslide winner for Defensive Player of the Year, an honor he curiously had never won before. The award was clinched by performances like the one he put in during a game in January, when he found himself matched up with Houston Rocket behemoth Yao Ming, who stands a half-foot taller and outweighs Garnett by 60 pounds. Garnett does not typically guard men of this size, but Perkins and Scot Pollard had both fouled out, and so with just over six minutes left and the Celtics leading by one, he went to work.
Individual defense in the NBA is really about geometry. Yao had been getting the ball about 4 feet from the basket and dropping in bank shots all night. Garnett's job was to change Yao's angle, which he accomplished by pushing him away from his preferred spot before the entry pass arrived. Now 6 feet away from the basket, Yao missed a hook shot. A few possessions later, he had become visibly uncomfortable. He tried an assortment of fakes and pivots, but Garnett held his ground, then swatted away Yao's awkward-looking shot, punctuating the block with a primal scream. With the victory secure, Garnett emerged from a time-out raising his arms slowly skyward, demanding the spotlight, building the crowd into a frenzy.
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There are three places where the members of a professional basketball team interact. The most obvious is in games, which naturally receive the most scrutiny. The second is in the locker room, and an anthropologist could have a field day studying the complex interpersonal relationships among players, and between players and the press. The third place is behind closed doors, in practice and in meetings, and it is by far the most critical. You can fool the fans and the press, but you can't get anything past NBA players, who are among the world's foremost cynics. "Kevin is all by example," Rivers says. "You can talk about it all day, but if you don't back it up, no one's going to listen to you, and you will get old real quick."
That started during Garnett's introductory press conference, when he refused to have his picture taken without Pierce and Allen in the shot. From that point on, he always waved off questions that even hinted at personal acclaim. After a much-hyped victory over the Phoenix Suns in late March, Pierce gave an emphatic summation of Garnett's impact on the franchise, saying, "He changed the culture around here." Garnett, seated next to Pierce, responded by putting his hand over Pierce's mouth. "We changed it. We."
It continued during the season, as Rivers had to invent ways to shorten practices to prevent Garnett from burning himself out, and in film study, where Garnett immediately owned up to his mistakes—out loud, in front of his teammates. He did it so readily, the coach was taken aback. "In my experience, the star player a lot of times wants to explain their way out of it," Rivers says. "He would look at the tape and say, ‘God, I was awful.' That's leadership."
One day last September, a month before training camp officially opened and a half-hour before an optional practice was scheduled to begin, Garnett was already on the court, working on his shot. After missing three straight, he ran six baseline suicides—two for every miss. This was why the Celtics had blown up their team, and blown the salary cap, but it would be months before their big gamble would be validated. Taking in the scene from above the floor where the Celtics offices are located, Wyc Grousbeck was feeling confident. Turning to friends, he said, "That's who Kevin Garnett is."
