Today is NBA draft lottery day, and Celtics fans the world over are hoping that Lady Luck will smile on the Celtics this time after those heartbreaking bad bounces of the lottery balls in 1997 and 2007. And though I dont know if this is the right time to post this, heres what I wrote almost six years back when Boston lost the draft lottery in 2007 but won the NBA title in 2008, just to provide perspective. RELIGION AND THE BOSTON CELTICS It certainly is a long way now from the prayer meetings that we attended while wishing for the lottery balls to bounce the Boston Celtics’ way and give the most successful franchise in NBA history a shot at picking Greg Oden, or Kevin Durant (if one were to believe some inside stories about Danny Ainge’s preference for the 2007 draft). It’s like light years away after all the things that have transpired between those days and now. But those two All-Americans, for us at that time, were worth all the trouble as they were regarded as two of the most talented prospects to come out of the woodwork in the past decade, and both, especially Oden, could potentially serve as the foundation of a franchise that was in the process of rebuilding, or, as we wanted to think in the Celtics’ case, retooling to become legitimate contenders for many years to come. Really, if one was looking for a vivid example of basketball interests and religion mixing in a perfect fusion of temporal, seemingly trivial pursuits and more serious and certainly higher-placed spiritual concerns, our fervent efforts at storming the heavens for the ping-pong balls to bounce right on May 22, 2007 couldn’t have been topped. There we were – Ben Valencia (our dear colleague who may now be in Canada but is no less passionate about the Celtics and their fortunes), Tim Aquino (he of the Boston-Toronto game fame who personally witnessed that buzzer-beating Ray Allen game clincher in November last year and was caught on TV while he did), Kim Lesaca (famed violinist John’s similarly-inclined nephew who has departed for Texas to look after his ailing sister and is set to join Ben in the Land of the Cloverleaf), Joseph Cueto (one of our moderators in our e-group Celtics Philippines who painstakingly compiled the names you’ll later see here), Kristoffer Lumingkit (the swashbuckling Kit Rapido who breathes and sleeps Green and is certainly one of our group’s bulwarks), and I – joining some Bible group guys whom we didn’t know to be able to have a forum for this biggest of all wishes, bearing in mind that Bible quote that “when two or more gather together and ask for something in My Name, they’ll receive it.” And this was on top of the novenas (of which I’d lost count) that I personally made to ask the good Lord and various saints to bring Oden to Beantown, again bearing in mind that Boston’s fortunes really nosedived when it lost the Tim Duncan lottery a decade earlier when it already had the best chances of landing him, as compared to the percentage in 2007 which was a little smaller. REPLAY OF 1997. Imagine then our feelings when the lottery balls did a replay of 1997, and, worse, even relegated the Celtics to the worst possible position (fifth) in the 2007 draft? Joseph recalled he was stunned. Kim was likewise rendered speechless at first while Ben was horror-struck. Others swore at the Celtic luck that, at that point, really looked rotten and appeared to absolutely suck. It was as if somebody punched you in the gut, and worse. I recall telling Kim it was my “worst NBA moment,” even worse than the Duncan fiasco, and perhaps the other tragedies that hit the Celtics earlier considering the cumulative effect these more recent misfortunes had to have on the team and its fans. When Len Bias for instance died after the Celtics’ previous last championship in 1986, we thought we still had a pretty good team then – with Larry Bird leading the original Big Three and Boston still looking capable of becoming champions – and we didn’t realize how good Bias really was until later, when his body of work and potential greatness had come into full light. And even when Reggie Lewis followed Bias, probably the greatest talent never to step on an NBA floor, to the Great Beyond seven years later, we still held on to the hope that things would even out through the acknowledged cycle of highs and lows that teams normally go through. Well, nothing of that sort came for 21 long years. Wyc Grousbeck, recalling that fateful day in a recent interview, admitted that losing the 2007 draft lottery had to be the low point in his tenure as principal owner of the Celtics. “Not winning the lottery (was) sheer misery,” he recalled. “Which was made worse by knowing that in 50 or 55 minutes everybody who bleeds green would be feeling just as bad as I was feeling at that moment (I found out early because I was in the lottery ball room). I felt terrible for myself and even worse for the people like Tommy and Helen Heinsohn and everyone else who still had hope.” Grousbeck was right, of course, even if he probably didn’t know that a bunch of converted prayer warriors more than 8,000 miles away was feeling exactly like that. Two decades, after all, has to be an eternity for dyed-in-the-wool roundball junkies who hardly knew nothing before but success and championship victories. “Twenty-one years of wretched luck is what we’ve had,” I told a still-optimistic Kim who decided to wear his Celtics sneakers and baller that day, although I warned him I was beginning to sense an 86-year curse in allusion to the Boston Red Sox, who had to endure a championship drought that long before putting an end to the dry spell by winning the 2004 World Series. “Heads up, my man. I believe the Lord has something great in store for us,” Kim, as level-headed as they come, insisted despite my lamentations. BEGINNING OF THE END. Well, Kim really looked like a man of great faith on that fateful day. Celtics fans could have cursed their luck to high heavens but, if one really kept his faith (I doubt if I really did), he could very well point to May 22, 2007 as the beginning of the end of the Celtics’ wretched luck, despite the huge pall of gloom that seemed to blanket the ballclub at that point. God after all works in mysterious ways, doesn’t He? And He did work in such a mysterious, roundabout fashion that even the staunchest Celtics supporter, or the most spiritual creature with Green passion, wouldn’t have expected the turn of events that would later follow what seemed to be a hopeless situation at that stage. With the Celtics out of the Oden-Durant sweepstakes, Ainge, Boston’s executive vice president of basketball operations, went to work. He pulled a draft-day trade that sent the rights to that year’s fifth pick – Jeff Green – and veterans Delonte West and Wally Szczerbiak to Seattle on June 28, 2007 for All-Star guard Ray Allen and the rights to the 35th choice, which turned out to be Glen Davis. A month later, he completed what would become the biggest deal for the Celtics in more than 20 years, a deal that would change the course of history for the franchise and bring it back to its glorious elite status. Using what in his words was the Celts’ “best young player,” Al Jefferson, two first-round picks (including one that Boston acquired from Minnesota in an earlier deal), a handful of other young pieces that included Ryan Gomes, Sebastian Telfair and Gerald Green plus the expiring contract of Theo Ratliff and cash as trading chips, Ainge landed the big fish that he always wanted, Timberwolves superstar Kevin Garnett. As everybody now knows, of course, Garnett later combined with resident Boston top gun Paul Pierce and Allen plus a bunch of promising youngsters that Ainge picked up from the draft scrap heap (Rajon Rondo, Kendrick Perkins, Tony Allen, Leon Powe and Davis) and role players (James Posey, Eddie House, P.J. Brown and Sam Cassell) to engineer the greatest one-season turnaround in league history (42 more victories) and capture the 17th NBA championship in franchise annals. FALLING INTO PLACE. A lot of things had to fall into place, of course, for the Celtics to pull off this revival, not the least of which was the Allen deal that first had to happen before Garnett would agree to come to Boston. Ainge had always wanted to acquire Garnett from the time he was said to have become available the previous year. The 6-foot-11 power forward, however, would have none of it, preferring to come to a contending team, which Boston was perceived to be far from being after a 24-58 season. Ainge thus had to train his sights on Allen, and once he did get the latter, the process of getting KG became easier. Still, the direction of going after veteran stars wouldn’t have been taken had the Celtics won the lottery in May. While Ainge has always said that he wanted to accumulate assets to be able to later go after established stars using these assets as chips, he certainly wouldn’t have parted with Jefferson and some of the other young players that he traded had he won the lottery and landed either Oden or Durant. He would have gone the development route (one of the three Ds he talked about, along with the draft and deals, when he took over the Celtic helm in 2003) and tried to build around his young players with perhaps Pierce as leader in the effort to corral a 17th title. But the hands of a far superior Being seemed to be at work as each scenario unfolded to seemingly orchestrate the way Boston went, or so people who believed the prayers we said for a lottery victory were not wasted claimed. And when Boston did go the way it did, the same hands appeared to be at work helping influence the turn of events. LA Lakers coach Phil Jackson, himself a professed practitioner of the mystical science who’s not given to making bold statements lightly, for example went as far as saying that the late Celtic patriarch Red Auerbach told Kevin McHale to give Garnett to Boston to enable the latter to beat his team in the bidding for the 11-time All-Star. “That was a blessing for them,” Jackson said. “We didn’t have the connection to make it happen for us.” And even what happened to Oden later seemed to have been tied to this uncanny turn of events and inevitably points to what actually became the Celtics’ good fortune in having lost the draft lottery. This was after the seven-foot slotman from Ohio State, who was taken first overall by Portland in the draft that June, underwent knee surgery in September and had to miss the entire season because of that. Imagine if the Celtics won the lottery and drafted Oden? While the young big man is certainly still a great prospect, Boston wouldn’t be hanging banner No. 17 now had things turned out the way its faithful army wished they would. The rebuilding, or retooling, process would still be going on with every Green-hearted junkie still looking – and praying – for the Celtics to reach their hoped-for final destination. “Galing talaga ni Lord!” Kim blurted when I broke the news to him that Oden was lost for the season on account of his knee injury. “I knew something good will come out sa prayer meeting natin.” Tim, speaking from the US recently, added, “God might have been smiling at us when we were praying for the No. 1 or 2 pick kasi with our limited minds ‘yun ang akala natin na sagot sa mga problema natin. Only to watch in amazement how things unfolded and how God worked things out!” Divine intervention? Answered prayers, or pure luck? Whatever one wants to call it, it can’t be denied that the Celtics’ 17th title was wrought with more than physical and material factors coming into play, and that more than likely, the magic of religion was at work to bring about a fulfilment of the dream of a long-suffering group of incorrigible devotees.
Posted on: Tue, 20 May 2014 23:50:26 +0000
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