In this installment of FreeDarko's
new running feature, we suggest peering at two teams that, despite their youth and intriguing veteran swingmen, fail to completely capture our imagination. Tonight's Celtics/Magic contest causes me to think back to 2002 and its summer of hope. Paul Pierce was coming off a dominant season, in which he was named to his first All-Star Team and was looking like a legitimate Top 10 player in the League. Meanwhile, in central Florida, Grant Hill was poised for a comeback season after playing only fourteen games in 2001-02. What happened, as we all now know, was that Pierce's ball-hogging during a disastrous World Championships run ended up tarnishing his reputation so foully that he's only now beginning to redeem himself, and Hill has yet to play a full season on that mangled ankle. Sometimes things don't work out as planned. Yet, we perservere and play on, so why not check up on how our heroes are doing now in the '06? All is not so grim. Also, there are a couple young big men playing tonight who I hear are supposed to be pretty good.
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A note on the new Arenas-inspired tees--due to events beyond our control, they will not be ready until the week after
Thanksgiving. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your patience in this matter, and as always, we're still taking orders for the classic FD shirts.
2 Comments:
01-02 Paul Pierce was just ridiculous. I found myself cheering for the Celtics that entire season. That was the year they made that come back against the Nets in Game 3 of the Eastern conference Finals. I really thought they were going to make it to the Finals that year, but J-Kidd was just too much to handle that year. You'll probably recall JKidd taking over the rest of that series. He single-handedly threw an ass whoopin on Paul and the rest of the Celts...complete with three pointers, fast breaks, ally oops and lock down defense. I think he took about 5 charges in game 6 of that series.
They fell of quickly after that season because they didn't re-sign there floor leader Kenny Anderson in the off-season, and they made a really big mistake of trading Joe Johnson for Rodney Rogers and Tony Buckets right at the trade deadline the season before. Imagine a squad with Joe Johnson, Paul Pierce and Antoine Walker.
The thought of trading Johnson for Rogers and Delk must be ravaging the hearts of 3000 angry commenters at Celticsblog.com
I'm jonesing for the new tee!
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