Ubuntu. A word that the Celtics repeated before, during and after each and every one of the games they played during the 2007-08 season. A team-oriented concept, the South African expression focuses on the loyalty of people and their relationships. That exactly reflects the prevailing group chemistry that the Boston team had, regaining the lost glory of their franchise 22 years later.
The agglomeration of stars, well controlled egos and overflowing talent, was masterfully resolved thanks to the spiritual connection that brought together contrasting people with different origins, around a single objective: the ring. That award that Bill Russell had made a habit and Larry Bird a constant possibility, but that had been relegated to a chimera in the biggest basketball crisis the state of Massachusetts had ever experienced, proved the absolute truth that everyone eventually learns in the NBA: winning is not easy. It never is.
Danny Ainge was (and is) a battle-hardened man, with experience, incredible leadership skills and uncommon intelligence in a world where hungry sharks always swim through turbulent waters to get ahold of the best fish. Ainge had been one of the referents of the last champion Celtics, back in the 80s, arriving a year after the first championship (1981) and conquering those of 1984 and 1986 together with Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and company. He still played a few more Finals, in 1993 with the Suns, a team of which he became a coach shortly after. On May 9, 2003, Ainge accepted a behind-the-scenes job to lead the Celtics back home to a long-overdue but hopeful rebuild after the 2002 Eastern Finals.
Ainge waited patiently for his moment, letting Antoine Walker slip away and relying on a young Doc Rivers for the bench after a fine run with the Magic. There were many voices calling for the coach’s dismissal after the failure of 2006-07, but Ainge is a man tied to the idiosyncrasies of the city of Boston and a mythical franchise that has always cared for its figures like nowhere else. The same reason that cost him so much to put an end to that project that he started in the summer of 2007 and which he did not dissolve until 2013, was the one that led him to give Rivers a new opportunity, this time with a team with whom he’d already had a few excuses left. After the 24-58, Ainge saw that there were pieces in the market that were worth taking a step forward for, completing a squad in the process, disorganized by many inconsistent egos and with a real lack of synchrony, as well as obvious weakness at shooting guard and power forward, something that would soon change.
The manager moved to two bands; on July 18, he selected Jeff Green with the fifth overall pick, and traded him along with Wally Szczerbiak and Delonte West to the Sonics in exchange for Ray Allen. Ainge took advantage of the arrival of Sam Presti and his change of air in Seattle to get a talented shooting guard who was worth more than Szczerbiak and West combined, was a better scorer and defender, and had an impeccable reputation in the League, after being the reference of the last competitive Bucks until the arrival of Anteto and some Sonics who lived their last moments of glory with him, before changing cities a couple of years later, leaving behind a long-awaited franchise that we’ll see if Kevin Garnett recovers.
Presti found a promising young man like Green, who would accompany Durant during his first seasons, and two insubstantial but talented shooting guards, who ended up having their role in LeBron James’s Cavaliers, arriving shortly after. In the process, of course, he was freeing himself from Allen’s contract, taking a cut from him and saving $16 million before he became a free agent and left for nothing. The shooter landed in his new destination after the two best seasons of his career at a statistical level, in which he had averaged 25.1 and 26.4 points per game and had become, definitively, part of the upper class of the League.
However, Ainge’s crown jewel would arrive a few days later. Kevin Garnett arrived at the Celtics in one of the most notorious transfers in history and the one that would have the most compensation for a single player, up to seven. His trade was arranged in exchange for Al Jefferson, Ryan Gomes, Sebastian Telfair, Gerald Green, Theo Ratliff, money, a first-round pick from Boston in the 2009 NBA Draft, and a first-round pick from Minnesota in the same draft that they owned from the transfer between Ricky Davis and Wally Szczerbiak in 2006, and from which Jonny Flyn ended up leaving. The play was masterful for the manager, who prevented the Lakers, immersed in a farce around a Kobe who threatened to leave, from taking over the star, something that the latter came to oppose precisely because of knowing about the problems between the escort and the franchise, which was later resolved. Garnett would sign as soon as he landed an extension for three years and an additional amount of 60 million to be distributed between 2009 and 2012. Ainge secured the future with the missing piece, who’d be willing to do anything to get the ring.
Since then, and although history does not remember it that way, the Boston Celtics became Kevin Garnett’s team. It is true that the big three formed with Allen and Pierce would be iconic, but Garnett was the soul, the shepherd, the leader who would do anything for his companions and would die for them. The 12 years spent in Minnesota had hardened his character, but had blurred his great goal, the championship, elusive even in the best season in franchise history, with the star as MVP and that trio he formed with Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell. Since then, the Wolves did not step on the playoffs, which led owner Glen Taylor to look for a transfer before he fed up and let him go to start an absolutely dysfunctional reconstruction, resolved with only one playoff participation in more than a decade and with much sorrow and little glory on a road to hell that seems to never end.
Garnett had been with the Wolves for 12 years, which he had joined from high school in 1995. 927 games, a veteran and the player who had been on a single team for the longest in the entire league among those who were active. The power forward never contained his rage and transmitted his energy to the entire group in that mental battle that was coming. The Celtics were the eighth oldest team in the competition and their star knew that the sooner the better. His fights with Howard, the smacks to Bogut, making his partner Glenn Davis cry, the hesitation to Calderón or the dirty and scavenging trash talking he used with Tim Duncan, his counterpart and great rival with whom he faced physically but was never close to in rings. Yes, in consolidating a position that has reached its peak in the 21st century, even though Karl Malone and Charles Barkley laid the foundations years before. Garnett seemed like the lost soul of the franchise, the one that had taken two long decades to arrive and that joined Pierce’s well-known commitment and Allen’s shot to form a team with a lot of legend despite winning only a ring.
It was defense that made those Celtics champions. Doc Rivers is a magnificent coach, a good guy who knew how to act under pressure, friendly and close to players and rivals. A man who falls well. He also knew how to be pragmatic, delegating the defense to his assistant, a Tom Tihibodeau who cemented his reputation thanks to Garnett, the greatest ally he has had on court apart from Derrick Rose, his ephemeral messiah in Chicago. The green tide created that year was one of the most impressive defensive networks in history, causing its rivals to add the worst field goal percentage in the entire League and, at the same time, the highest turnover average, which in sum did not have a precedent since there was a record of both statistical categories. In addition, they were the second team that received the fewest points per game (90.3, just two tenths behind the Pistons) and had the best defensive rating, the sixth best in the entire history of the franchise.
And within an orderly attack, the Celtics became the fourth team in the NBA in field goal percentage and the fifth in triple percentage, thanks to the 39% average of a Pierce who went to 19.6 points, the team’s top scorer, and almost 40 % of an Allen who reached 17.4. And with Garnett scoring on that side of the track, being the infinite support of the team with 18.8 points, 9.2 rebounds and 3.4 assists. The power forward already had a premonitory debut (22 + 20 + 5) and raised his numbers in the playoffs (20.4 + 10.5), the only one of the entire team to do so despite equally important blows from Pierce.
The Celtics never had such a difference in points in their games, resolved by more than 10, the only time in their long history in which they exceeded ten in this statistical section. In addition, they reached the second best record in the history of the franchise, an unappealable 66-16, achieved a spectacular 35-6 in the Garden and an even more spectacular 31-10 away. They were fifth in steals, ninth in assists and defensive rebounds, and first in net rating with a spectacular 11.3. Ainge, who had filled the team with second and important swords such as James Posey (champion with the Heat in 2006) or Eddie House, bore fruit in a squad that also had Leon Powe and Kendrick Perkins, other defensive specialists such as Tony Allen and two players whose importance was paramount to face the playoffs, especially from a moral point of view, and who arrived just a few weeks before the end of the regular season: Sam Cassell and PJ Brown.
The playoffs were not the bed of roses that the regular season represented. That was where the Celtics would cling to their past, as if the ancestors of the historic franchise could protect them from the revolutions they faced, solved with the support of the public and an extraordinary defense that worked much better at home than with visitors. The Hawks took them to seven unexpected games in the first round, although Garnett ended up resolving with 21 + 9 + 4, adding two steals per game and a seventh (99-65) in which there was no history. Yes, there was against LeBron’s Cavs, who reached the semifinals with two old acquaintances (Szczerbiak and West) and 45 wins to their credit with which, by the way, they would not have qualified for the playoffs in the West, in which the Post-We Believe Warriors were left out with 48. Never could the post-Jordan East, in its most glorious stage, be more competitive than its counterpart conference, from which 14 of its last 21 champions came.
LeBron also took the Celtics to seven games in a supreme effort that produced 27 points, 6.4 rebounds and more than 7 assists, with 45 points in the seventh and final game. But he gave in to the response of Pierce (41) and Garnett (19.6 + 10.9 in the series) and the Garden. The victory this time was tighter (97-92), but the Bostonians flew to their first Eastern finals since 2002 to finish off the last definitive version of the Pistons (59-23) who won the ring in 2004, leaving their first and only game of the entire postseason at the Garden (103-97), but ruling in six games with 23 points and almost 10 rebounds from his power forward, who reached his first Finals and gave the Celtics their first chance for the title since 1987.
Not even Kobe Bryant, MVP of the season ahead of Chris Paul and, of course, Kevin Garnett, could beat those Celtics. The power forward, best Defender, was the leader of a defense that only allowed the Lakers to reach 100 points in two of the six games (108.6 in regular season), and the constant help kept the shooting guard drowned in the perimeter for most of the match. Ray Allen went for 20 points per game with more than 50% in triples, including 7 of 9 in the sixth and final in which the Lakers suffered one of the most bitter defeats in their history (131-92) with confetti and Gatorade included, which prevented them from leaving the track until it had been fully cleaned. Pierce went to an average of 22 points and was the MVP of a Finals in which, morally, the prize was a Garnett who kissed the floor of the Garden at the end of the series as if that had always been his home: 18 points, 13 rebounds and 3 assists for him, drying out Pau Gasol (14+10), and going over him in a sobering defeat for the Spaniard, who suffered the name ‘soft’ to the point of exhaustion in the following two seasons and who even persisted despite exacting his revenge in 2010.
Kobe averaged 25.7 points, but with 50% shooting from the field, drowned out by the collective and individual defense of Posey, that large profile against which he always suffered, just as it happened with Thysaun Prince in 2004. It is true that the Lakers could not count on Andrew Bynum, which favored Garnett being able to focus on Pau who had already had to do with Perkins before; a man with little talent but extremely useful for Doc Rivers and who reached his peak with those Celtics beyond the statistics. The Lakers blew a 24-point lead in Game 4 that showed they weren’t ripe for the ring yet. The image of Pau on the ground with his nemesis crushing in front of him serves as a summary of the tie in which Boston used the least effort in those playoffs, without meaning that the victory was easy. Rarely had Phil Jackson seen how his triangle sank as much as he did then, with no response against a clearly superior team led by one of the greatest energetic purities in history: Kevin Garnett.
The power forward reached, at last, the coveted ring. That man who had finally touched glory and who proved his usefulness when his injury the following year separated him from the playoffs in which the Celtics fell in the semifinals. Before, they had started in an almost more overwhelming way than the previous year (27-2 at Christmas), but they would no longer be able to repeat the championship feat, including revenge against the Lakers in 2010, when Kobe and Pau sentenced the Celtics, who reached their last Finals that year. Ainge put up with the project with a lot of effort and the projection of a Rondo who was growing by leaps and bounds and who made up for the veteran that had inexorably turned into old age, and the absence of a Thibodeau who lasted until 2010. Without him, the Celtics brushed the Finals for the last time with 3-2 up against the Heat of a LeBron who in a historic game chased away gossip (45 + 15 + 5) and set course for his particular dynasty.
In 2013, those Celtics broke up, with Allen who had already left a year earlier. Garnett went through the Nets and Wolves, retiring at home, and will have his number retired from Boston as well as being included in the Hall of Fame along with that missing generational partner that is Kobe Bryant and another to whom his career is linked, Tim Duncan. It is worth remembering the words of Sean Grande, radio announcer for the Wolves, when in the summer of 2007 the power forward headed for the Celtics, leaving his team of a lifetime. Journalist Bill Simmons asked Grande to define the great hero that the franchise had had, to which he did not hesitate: “He gives everything, his heart and soul, in game number 13 against Atlanta, in 61 against Charlotte or in Game 6 of the conference finals.” That was Kevin Garnett, the man who caused Kobe and Phil Jackson to lock themselves in the Garden locker room for hours. The one who brought back Boston’s lost glory. The one who won, in that 2008, his champion ring. Something that, we have already said, is not easy. It never is.
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