Welcome! Come one, come all, to the main event! It's season preview time, and Upside and Motor is ready to rock your world. The previews will be both concrete and lyrical in this magical world, both by numbers and by prose. To take a look at all the previews, click here.
Straight Up
Straight Up features all the stuff you actually want to see in your team previews: who are the new kids on the block, who skipped town, and where the team stands for the upcoming season. Along with my projection and standing for the upcoming season, it'll also feature three individual awards: Team MVP (let's not get into the debate over exactly what that means), the Most Important Reserve, and the Most Unheralded Asset.
Projected Record: 61-21 (1st in the Atlantic Division, 1st in the Eastern Conference)
Off-season Acquisitions: Darius Miles, Patrick O'Bryant, J.R. Giddens, Billy Walker, the Larry O'Brien trophy
Notable Losses: James Posey, P.J. Brown
2008-2009 Team MVP: Kevin Garnett - A elite defender, an offensive force...am I really justifying this?
Most Important Reserve: Darius Miles - Whether or not he can help Bostonians forget the loss of James Posey could be a deal-breaker. At least in terms of whether or not they win the East comfortably.
Most Unheralded Asset: Kendrick Perkins - Perk continues to anchor the paint, the defense, and well, be a beast. Too often he's a footnote of a footnote when it comes to defensive credit, but Perk really is the man.
Poetry in Motion
Poetry in Motion will feature my feeble attempts at mimicking the sonnets of one William Shakespeare, complete with a weak, liberal interpretation of iambic pentameter and an identical rhyme scheme. As they say, the NBA imitates art...I mean poetry...err, life imitates the NBA...or I imitate poetry while writing about the NBA. Something like that. Either way, each preview will contain two sonnets: one focusing on a wider, team outlook and another focusing on the roles and futures of individual players. Revel! Criticize! Enjoy!
The Celtics face a long and lonely road,
That’s not impossible by any means,
For them I dedicate this simple ode,
The true contenders still wear Kelly green.
Posey’s long gone and P.J. - retired,
All rests on the shoulders of und’rsized bigs,
The key is maintaining that raw desire,
That helped them earn their championship digs.
One year older and one year wiser, too,
But with aching backs, sore knees, and the like,
Be it injuries or self’sh “rights” pursued,
Only they can halt the way to high’st heights.
Noblest defense honored the teams of yore,
A repeat cements their place’n Celtic lore.
So much depends on the Celtic givens,
Garnett a monster, and Pierce the damn truth,
Rondo and Perk, provided they’re driven,
Ray Allen must find his fountain of youth.
Giddens and Pat are question marks, riddles,
Rondo needs to nurture that jump’r with care,
How will Miles cope with being sixth fiddle?
If these play’rs answer, the trophy is theirs.
Powe and Glen Davis pack the punch needed,
House and Cassell aren’t gun-shy, but still,
Replacing James Posey and what he did -
A hindrance to their potential, fulfilled.
Only fools dishonor the champs, the best,
The surefire pick to fight against the West.
Player Preview Spotlight: Glen Davis
The Player Spotlight feature highlights just one of the many cogs that make up the team. They may not be the best player on the team and they may not be the most recognizable (or who knows, they may be both), but I can guarantee that they're interesting. Their game, their on-court persona, their role within the greater scope of the team. Something about the player in the spotlight deserves your attention, and as usual, I'm more than willing to point it out to you.
I'm not sure anyone knows quite what to make of Glen Davis. He outgrew the "Baby Shaq" nickname, becoming just a "Big Baby," but despite his wide frame he is just 6'9''. He has a shooting touch, but has reigned in his range in Boston and does his best to play as tweaked out as possible, bumping and pushing anything not wearing green. This is exactly why I love Glen Davis.
Post-Shaq, LSU churns out a particular kind of power forward: Stormile Swift. Tyrus Thomas. Anthony Randolph. I think you know where I'm going with this. Davis looks like Swift after he at Ty and Randolph. He piled up the points and the boards in college, and had a lot of success. But he is so antithetical of the hyper-athletic power forward prototype of the future that you have to pay attention. The game is getting smaller, they say. It's a guard's game, they say. Threes are fours, fours are fives, and fives are either versatile or in Europe (or probably not even there, anymore). Davis weighs almost three hundred pounds, doesn't handle the ball with ease or pass all that well. But when Doc Rivers waves his way at the end of the bench, there is little doubt that Big Baby is going to go in there and do his thang.
Davis doesn't really have a reliable back-to-the-basket game to speak of, but that's not to say that he doesn't have a place on the court as a big man. There's a certain chaos to his game; not in the way that Stephen Jackson wrecks the cosmos, or in the way that J.R. Smith is a revolutionary, but chaos in the sense that his singular goal on the court is to create a mania that only the Celtics can decipher. He bangs around under the basket for rebounds. He holds, he shoves. He's much more active on defense than you would ever anticipate. And that's the true beauty of this second-year second-rounder. With P.J. Brown out of the picture, I'm anxious to see if Big Baby will see the court more. The acquisition of Patrick O'Bryant would seem to hedge that hope, and Darius Miles may drown the possibility of Davis replacing some minutes from Posey's void. Plus, I'm sure Leon Powe would have something to say about all this.
Still, it perplexes me that Doc wasn't able to find more time for Davis in the playoffs (especially the Finals). It's as if he was afraid of the Frankenstein's monster in Baby's game: would the creature be unleashed on the Lakers by way of tenacious defense, hustle, and putbacks? Or would the monster turn on its creator with unforced turnovers, offensive fouls, and the murder of Doc's wife?
...OK, so the literary parallel isn't so concrete. But the duality of Davis remains. He has his flaws and his limitations. And you'd be an absolute fool not to see the wonder in them.
Season Previews, F'real
For those poor, conservative souls trapped in normativity, I'll make sure to send you to a few places where you can read through more conventional, in-depth season previews. Most of these links will be from team bloggers whose trade is knowing what there is to know about their respective teams, so tell your ears to perk up; it's time to listen.
Celtics Blog
Green Bandwagon
Red's Army
Ballerblogger
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