Boston Doesn’t Deserve It

Just like my gripe that American society has become utterly adverse to the idea of sacrifice or the idea of thinking about others or your community, my gripe that Boston sports fan’s need to be taken down from their high horse is a common refrain on this site. But if you’ll allow me, I’d like to throw one more piece of evidence on the pile.

I feel like I rag on Bill Simmons, aka the Sports Guy, an awful lot and I’m going to do so again here, but I swear to you, I actually like reading his articles and listening to his podcasts. That said, Bill Simmons provides two perfect reasons for why Celtic fans don’t deserve an NBA championship.

First, despite denying that his argument for Kevin Garnett as this season’s MVP was a ‘homer’ pick, there is no way anyone with half a brain is buying that. Chris Paul had a monster season that was unprecedented, which is saying a lot considering all the great point guards that have come before him. Likewise, Kobe crushed the competition by himself prior to getting Gasol and then upon Gasol’s arrival he finally showed that he’s able to make his teammates better. While this wasn’t his best year in his lustrous career, he certainly deserved the MVP more than KG. And actually, in a podcast Simmons conceded that his argument for KG as MVP was flawed. But more importantly, Simmons’ most recent article points out that while KG has been the key figure in turning the Celtics around this year, he may be the reason that the Celtics fail to win a title due to his inability play well down the stretch in clutch moments. In other words, the guy who epitomizes Boston area fandom and is particularly knowledgeable about the NBA has flip flopped on the Celtic’s best player. For Simmons, KG has gone from being the MVP to being a drag on the team if the game is on the line in the fourth quarter. And it’s true, KG in the clutch constantly defers to his teammates to avoid having to take the big shot himself.

This gets to the heart of the ‘big three’ myth. While Simmons was reluctant from the beginning to call Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and KG the ‘big three’ considering that Boston already had a ‘big three’ who won title after title, the rest of the media and indeed the players themselves relished the idea. Only recently have Simmons and writers with less insight into the NBA come to the realization that Ray Allen is a shadow of himself, which reduces the ‘big three’ to two. Throw in the fact that KG disappears in crunch time and your left with just one guy, the guy who’s been in Bean Town the whole time, Paul Pierce. And Pierce isn’t exactly clutch either. He is a streaky shooter who osculates between seeming disinterested and being a ball hog. Thus, this team that the media, including Simmons, harkened as the next great thing, has no real clutch players, which is evidenced by the fact that in game 7 against the Cavs the guy who took and converted the clutch shot was not KG, was not Ray Allen, who was on the bench for most of the fourth quarter, and was not Peirce even though he had been shooting the lights out. Instead, the clutch shot came from P.J. Brown.

My point, therefore, is that Boston’s status as the media darling means that only now, two rounds into the playoffs, do some writers even begin to chip away at the hype-created mystic unduly bestowed upon the Celtics. They are a Potemkin village of a team and that would not be allowed to go unexamined in any city other than Boston where the sports writers are more than happy to tear down every team and fan base under the sun that isn’t in Boston. Their fan base and the media are like spoiled children who insist that your toys are worthless and their toys are infallible, all the while ignorant of the fact that they are basically the same thing.

My second point, and to me the more egregious one, is that Boston fans, also like children, think they deserve anything and everything right this moment. Bill Simmons and the rest of the Boston fans looked at their team as they were coasting toward the best record in the NBA and decided that their point guard, Rajon Rondo, wasn’t up to snuff. I’ve said before that I prefer college sports to pro sports and that when you think about it, college fans know the players first and then pro fans pick them up afterwards, which kind of makes the pro only fans bandwagon fans. To this end, I saw Rondo play at the University of Kentucky and I, like any other college fan, could tell that he was destined to be a solid player in the pros. But Celtic fans weren’t happy with him because, God forbid, he was a developing star player and not an established one. Thus, Simmons and the Boston fans and Boston-loving media demanded that they snatch up Sam Cassel to replace Rondo in the starting lineup and during crunch time and to add much needed veteran leadership.

Of course anyone not looking at that move through Celtic green colored glasses was asking, “what experience does Sam have other than the experience of making it to the playoffs a couple of times and then losing?” And, “if KG is SO great and SUCH a good leader, why do they need additional veteran leadership?”

Slowly but surely, Simmons and his ilk have come around to realize that Sam is worthless in the clutch and that he yells at his teammates and that the organization and fans basically made it clear to Rondo that they thought this washed up chump was an upgrade over him. Not good for team chemistry and morale. The craziest part is that not only was Rondo solid all year long but that unlike any of the ‘big three’ he was willing to take shots in crunch time; down the stretch he was the only one who’s eyes didn’t shrink from the spotlight.

But the most egregious thing is that for his excellent play, Rondo got thrown under the bus by his coach who is a media darling of epic proportions. Doc Rivers, who can’t coach a lick, which Simmons points out often, perpetually throws his young players under the bus when his team plays poorly. He’ll say they aren’t picking up or adhering to the game plan, which is absurd because if Rivers has a game plan that would be new to me, his coaching staff, and his players. Worse still is that, returning to the KG love-fest that I spoke of in point one, KG, the guy who is supposed to represent brotherhood and the Ubuntu philosophy that Rivers is so enthralled with, has never once stood up to Rivers after he called out the young guys like Rondo. And the media and fans at best don’t admit that they were wrong to bring in Cassel when they already had a perfectly good point guard.

My point is that while Boston is certainly one of the best teams in the NBA, the amount of public attention they draw is not only an instant of blatant favoritism, but poor sports analysis. If sports people would just take a step back from the hype they’ve created around the media friendly Celtics, they’d see that “The Big Ticket” only shows up for ¾ of the movie, that Paul Pierce’s knees shake in the waning minutes, and that Ray Allen might as well be sitting at home watching the game on TV. And if they’d realize that, they’d avoid the hypocrisy of championing these guys, this team, and their fans because they’d realize that all that Ubuntu stuff goes right out the door when Rivers needs to shift the blame off himself, that KG’s idea of brotherhood apparently means being silent both in the clutch and when your teammates are getting ripped, and that the allegedly superior Boston fans clamor, bitch, and whine to the point that any intelligence that they have evaporates as they throw a temper tantrum in demanding immediate success at the expense of developing a young player.

You know what other city’s fans do that? New York. So why do Boston fans get treated like the good guys while New York fans in all sports get treated like the evil empire? It’s hypocritical, it’s phony, it’s incredibly obnoxious, and it’s why Boston fans don’t deserve an NBA title.