By Blaidd Drwg

Clippers Coach Vinny Del Negro is on the hot seat because of his team’s middling performance. He received the dreaded “vote of confidence” from the GM and owner of the team. From espn.com:

…coach Vinny Del Negro received a vote of confidence from Clippers owner Donald Sterling and general manager Neil Olshey this week and appears safe to finish the season as the team’s coach after reportedly being on the hot seat last week.

Receiving the “vote of confidence” is a close to a guarantee that you are hanging on by a thread in professional sports. Too often, a manager or coach gets it and is fired within a couple of weeks. My prediction – Del Negro gets fired if the team goes .500 or worse over their next 8 games (which is about 2 weeks from the date of his “vote of confidence”.

By Blaidd Drwg

Dwight Howard recently broke the NBA record for free throw attempts in a game with 39. Howard, a career 59% free throw shooter, managed to hit only 21 of his attempts but still scored over 40 points and lead his team to victory. It got me thinking, how well does the hack-a-Shaq approach work? There have been 29 instances of a player shooting 25 or more free throw attempts since 1985. Here are the results of them:

In cases where someone went to the line 25+ times in a game, that player’s team came out ahead 18 out of 29 times. It isn’t a good comparison, since in a large number of those cases, it was the team’s best free throw shooter, and that is usually the last guy you want to foul. If you saw that 75% is where you want an NBA free throw shooter to be, lets take a look at all of the guys under that mark. There were 13 cases in which the guy at the line was under 75% and they won 9 of those games.

I was also surprised that Shaq didn’t end up on this list more often. I then though, maybe teams only use hack-a-Shaq in the playoffs. So I looked at Shaq’s playoff numbers from 1993-2005 and here is what I found:

• Shaq played in 192 games and his teams sported a 121-71 record, good for a 63% win rate.
• In those 192 games, Shaq only shot 20+ free throws 7 times, with a high of 39.
• I lowered the threshold to 15+ per game, thinking that they played hack-a-Shaq later in the game and found that there were 41 games where he went to the line at least 15 times.
• In those 41 games, his team sported a 29 – 12 record, good for 71% win rate.

I don’t want to bother doing this for anyone else since I have to look manually through the game logs to figure this out, but I am willing to make at least one general assumption:

The moral of the story, repeatedly fouling the big guy really doesn’t pay off.

By Blaidd Drwg

There is an article on ESPN about Danny Ainge being willing to break up the Celtics Big 3 of Garnett, Allen and Pierce. The Celtics are an old team, more than half of their roster is 29 or older and 4 of their 5 starters are over the age of 33. That is really not a recipe for success in the NBA. Is it any real wonder that the Celtics have started 5-8? What I really found interesting is a comment Ainge made in the article:

Ainge saw the Celtics pass up deals when Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish were aging, and the result was a steady deterioration that saw Boston not make the playoffs or advance beyond the first round from the 1992-93 to 2000-01 seasons.

“First of all, it’s a different era,” Ainge told The Globe. “I sat with Red (Auerbach) during a Christmas party (in the 1990s). Red was talking to Larry, Kevin, and myself and there was a lot of trade discussion at the time, and Red actually shared some of the trade discussions. And I told Red, what are you doing? Why are you waiting?

“He had a chance to trade Larry (to Indiana) for Chuck Person and Herb Williams and (Steve) Stipanovich and he had a chance to trade Kevin (to Dallas) for Detlef Schrempf and Sam Perkins. I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ I mean, I feel that way now. If I were presented with those kind of deals for our aging veterans, it’s a done deal to continue the success.”

Maybe it is just me, but it seems that this conversation took place after Bird, Parrish and McHale were retired. If that is the case, why the heck would you have said “What are you doing? Why are you waiting?” If this conversation took place in the 1990’s, those deals were long since past being able to be made. So either the conversation took place in the 1980’s, which would be odd, or Ainge didn’t think about the tense of his quote and should have used the past tense. My best guess is that this offer came around 1988-1989, which, ironically, would have been the year the Celtics traded Ainge to the Kings with Brad Lohaus for Ed Pinckney and Joe Kleine (not one of the better deals for the Celtics).

Would these deals have benefited the Celtics, most likely. The Celtics would have come out way ahead on the McHale deal. The problem is much more than just swapping players. I lived in Boston for 12 years. Larry Bird is pretty much as close to God as you can get in Boston after Ted Williams. I remember going to Celtics games well after Bird retired and he would get a standing ovation from the crowd, at half time, every time he walked across the floor to the tunnel. Red may have been the architect of the greatest franchise in history and not even he would be dumb enough to be known as the guy who traded Larry Bird. Bird was going to be a Celtic player as long as he wanted to be, as long as Red had any say in the matter.

I think what really did the Celtics in was poor drafting and a change in the way the game was played. Right around 1990, the NBA went from being a sport about teamwork to a game dominated by inside post players. Let’s look at the Celtics 1st Round picks from 1988 – 1995.

1988 – Brian Shaw (24th Overall)
1989 – Michael Smith (13th Overall)
1990 – Dee Brown (19th Overall)
1991 – Rick Fox (24th Overall)
1992 – Jon Barry (21st Overall)
1993 – Acie Earl (19th Overall)
1994 – Eric Montross (9th Overall)
1995 – Eric Williams (14th Overall)

Only one of those players, Dee Brown, averaged better than 10 Points per Game in his career. Granted, they were generally drafting in the bottom half of the first round, but the effectively drafted a bunch of role players and never supplemented that with a solid free agent signing. There were 2 truly awful picks in that group, solely on where they drafted.

In 1989, which is one of the deepest drafts in NBA history, the Celtics got 3 lousy seasons of Michael Smith and passed up the following players, all of whom were drafted in the first round after Smith: Tim Hardaway, Dana Barros, Shawn Kemp, BJ Armstrong and Vlade Divac (although the Celtics did redeem themselves a bit by taking Dino Radja in the second round).

In 1994, they completely blew it by taking the “great white hope”, a slow footed center from UNC, Eric Montross. Granted, there wasn’t a huge amount of talent at the back end of the draft, but honestly, it wasn’t hard to see that Montross wasn’t going to be the force in the middle the Celtics needed him to be. The poor drafting was supplemented by poor roster management. Here is the roster the Celtics fielded the year after Bird retired:

No. Player   Pos Ht Wt Birth Date Exp College
4  Alaa Abdelnaby   F-C 6-10 240 June 24, 1968 3 Duke University
7 Dee Brown G 6-1 160 November 29, 1968 3 Jacksonville University
12 Chris Corchiani G 6-0 185 March 28, 1968 2 North Carolina State University
20 Sherman Douglas G 6-0 180 September 15, 1966 4 Syracuse University
55 Acie Earl F-C 6-10 240 June 23, 1970 R University of Iowa
44 Rick Fox F-G 6-7 230 July 24, 1969 2 University of North Carolina
34 Kevin Gamble F-G 6-5 210 November 13, 1965 6 University of Iowa
43 Tony Harris G 6-3 190 May 13, 1967 1 University of New Orleans
30 Todd Lichti G-F 6-4 205 January 8, 1967 4 Stanford University
31 Xavier McDaniel F 6-7 205 June 4, 1963 8 Wichita State University
27 Jimmy Oliver G-F 6-5 205 July 12, 1969 1 Purdue University
00 Robert Parish C 7-0 230 August 30, 1953 17 Centenary College of Louisiana
54 Ed Pinckney F 6-9 195 March 27, 1963 8 Villanova University
40 Dino Radja F-C 6-11 225 April 24, 1967 R
50 Matt Wenstrom C 7-1 250 November 4, 1970 R University of North Carolina

Not exactly striking fear into the hearts of opponents, huh?

A few years ago, when Ainge started building the current Celtics roster, I told a friend of mine they probably were built for a 3-4 year run before the team got too old (and I had a very low opinion of Ainge as a GM and his ability to build a team with home grown talent). This is year 5 of that Celtics run. The Celtics have gotten old and have gotten little out of their last 5 drafts. Unfortunately, I believe the Celtics are headed for yet another down period in their storied franchise history.