Lebron James is happy Cleveland got the first pick, but isn’t positive they’ll find a franchise player. Dan Gilbert’s just as vindictive as ever; he hopes Lebron goes down in a sea of flames in round two. Derrick Rose and Tom Thibodeau look like a more formidable duo than LeWyane Jade. And Dwyane Wade’s son can’t stop teasing his father about Taj Gibson’s dunk. It’s Chicago-Miami, Game 2.

I’ve got the Heat tonight, even after they looked completely overmatched in Game 1. Tough to stop a two-headed monster two games in a row.

Have at it in the comment section, folks.

If this year’s NBA Draft class were a movie, it would be Gigli.

Actually, that might be unfair to Gigli. At least the movie had a few stars, even if they didn’t perform as such. This year’s NBA Draft might not have any stars. Sure, Kyrie Irving shows abnormal polish for a 19-year old and Derrick Williams burst onto the college scene with a fantastic sophomore year. But there’s no Kevin Durant or Lebron James in this class, nobody who has superstar written in bold letters across his forehead. Sadly for the Celtics, the later parts of the draft don’t seem very promising either.

Already a talent-bare year, the Draft’s depth has been hurt even further by the uncertain Collective Bargaining Agreement. Players like Jared Sullinger, Harrison Barnes, Perry Jones and Terrence Jones, all probable lottery picks, dropped out of the draft to remain in college. What’s left is a draft class one NBA scout simply called “abysmal.”

The Celtics, who have the 25th and 55th picks, will need to decide whether to use their own picks, move up in the draft, or move out of the draft altogether. Danny Ainge says he will consider all possibilities.

“There’s a chance we could move up. We have to see how it unfolds,” he told the Boston Herald. “We’ll definitely explore the possibilities. We have two (first-round) picks next year, so we have something to use if we wanted to move up in this year’s draft. But we could also explore moving out.”

Boston could have a deficiency in the middle next year (Nenad Krstic and Glen Davis are free agents, and Shaq and Jermaine O’Neal might retire), so adding size would be preferable. But big men picked later in the draft tend not to pan out; if there’s a seven-footer with skill, he’s almost always a lottery pick. Some big-bodied lottery picks aren’t even skilled. Just ask Rafael Araujo or Hasheem Thabeet.

“Everyone can always use bigs,” Ainge said. “And that’s where mistakes get made, because you’re drafting more for size than what the player can actually do.”

As Jeff Clark pointed out, I guess that’s why Ainge selected J.R. Giddens instead of DeAndre Jordan (doh).

Ainge said he isn’t worried about the draft’s talent level, describing the “expanding middle class” that might benefit a team like the Celtics picking in the late first round.

“It’s a draft that’s similar to recent drafts, and things seem to be moving in this direction. There’s a lot of decent players,” he explained. “There will be good players, but no transcendent players — no LeBron (James), Dwight Howard or Derrick Rose.”

You can call it an expanding middle class if you want, or you can call a spade a spade: this NBA Draft class could very well prove to be the league’s worst in a long time. In a telling statement, Ainge said Avery Bradley would have gone top five in this draft. Considering the extent Bradley’s struggles this past season, that says a lot about this year’s crop.

The Giddens pick notwithstanding, Ainge has been known to pull rabbits—or, rather, productive NBA players—out of his magic hat on draft day. If the Celtics are to improve their roster through such a weak draft, he’ll have to do just that.

Editor’s note: This is the second chapter of a book I’m writing this summer. You can read the previous chapter here: Chapter 1.

As always, I will keep the site updated with Celtics news. But since it’s the offseason (damn it) and news is slower than Zydrunas Ilgauskas, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to share some of my personal story.

– Jay

*****

My first taste of competitive basketball came in first grade. Okay, maybe calling it “competitive” is a stretch. But there was a scoreboard and two parents who acted as referees, and, well, to a six-year old it felt like Apollo Creed vs. Ivan Drago. I played for The Yellow Team, and we played in an in-town league consisting of first- and second-graders from my town. Almost every first- and second-grader in town played; there were no tryouts, so everyone made a team. Since nobody got cut, the talent level spanned from “future college basketball player” to “that kid probably doesn’t even know what a layup is.”

One player on my team, Ben, played like a young Bob Cousy. He dribbled around his back with ease, shot floaters in the lane, and made a habit of the no-look pass. Another player, Marc, played like a young Stevie Wonder. He wasn’t really blind, but, well, watching him play basketball you would think he was. His favorite shot was the one-armed gunsling from 30 feet out. The problem was that he couldn’t have reached from 15 feet. Our coaches tried to implore Marc to pass, but he fell in love with that gunsling—which was reminiscent of a medieval catapult—no matter how many times in a row he missed it. The talent discrepancy could be similar to Lebron James sharing a court with Chris Rock.

Despite Marc’s Antoine Walker-esque shot selection (he always searched for the four-point line), our team was good. Really good. We went undefeated in the regular season and made our way to the championship game with ease.

My family, as always, showed up in droves to support me. When I or one of my cousins played in an important game (in this case, my cousin John played on my team), my aunts, uncles and cousins would all show up to watch. It didn’t matter whether the game was a first-grade in-town game or a college bout against Jameer Nelson and Delonte West (my cousin Pat played against St. Joseph’s when he attended Boston University)—my family would roll up to the gym 20 deep. Any excuse to get together. Any excuse to support each other. We aren’t just passive observers, either. I’ll put it this way: local refs are very familiar with us.

My uncle Buddy knows every ref in New England by name, or at least it seems like he does. Buddy’s one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met. If he walks into a gym, he doesn’t just know everyone there; he also knows the names of everyone’s children and wives, and always wants to know how everyone is doing. But bad calls boil his blood. After a whistle he disagrees with, Buddy doesn’t scream at refs immediately. No, he patiently waits until the gym becomes completely silent before calling out the ref by his first name. His method assures two things: 1) that the ref can hear him, and 2) that everyone else in the gym can hear him, thereby embarrassing the ref quite a bit.

“Jerry, that’s one of the worst calls I’ve ever seen!” he might calmly shout. I know shouting calmly seems like an oxymoron, but there’s no better explanation for what Buddy does. He never loses his cool. He sits back with one leg folded over the other, sips on a coffee (normally from Dunkin Donuts), and calmly shouts at the refs. He’s louder than a foghorn and twice as obnoxious, but even when Buddy loses it he’s completely under control. “By my count, Andy, you owe us seven calls!” he bellows through a silent gym. After the game, of course, Buddy will go shake Andy’s hand and find out how his children are doing. But during the game, Andy and all other refs have targets on their backs.

Buddy’s not the only one in my family who harasses zebras on a daily basis, nor is he the worst. My mom, God bless her, promises me before every game that she’s done with chiding refs. “You should see me now, Jay,” she’ll tell me. “I don’t say a word anymore.” Inevitably, a missed traveling call or a bogus foul call will bring a vein popping out of her forehead and she’ll start right back in with her complaints. On multiple occasions, relatives of mine have been escorted out of gyms by police officers. We’ve started verbal fights with opposing coaches, broken up fights between eighth-graders (that was me—telling a 14-year old to “back the hell up” isn’t exactly something I’m proud of), and been ejected from gyms too many times to count. Just this past year, I complained about a ref’s bad call during my brother’s 8th-grade CYO game. The ref looked up at me and sarcastically noted, “Oh, I forgot you played Division One basketball.” As a ref, the biggest no-no you can make is responding to fans. But I laughed, then replied, “And I forgot you reffed Division One basketball.” Zing.

I’m making my family sound like something from a horror flick, but the second we get out of a gym we become the world’s most inviting family. Kind, hilarious, loving, accepting—I’m not bragging, but my family’s awesome. Once, a 25-year old man showed up to our family’s Thanksgiving party. My aunt opened the door, gave him a big hug and kiss, and ushered him inside. She got him a plate of food, filled up his glass with beer, and chatted with him for about ten minutes. At some point, he realized he’d come to the wrong house—his family was actually next door having their own get-together. But he probably wanted to stay with us instead. My aunt had had no idea who he was, but figured he was somebody’s boyfriend and thus treated him just like family. That’s the way my family works. If you’re with us, it’s like you’re one of us. Our biggest problem is that if we were a pack of werewolves, a gym floor would be our full moon.

But this was just first-grade and the referees were two volunteer parents, so my family refrained from any referee bashing. Instead they sat in the stands, about 20 of them in total, cheering their heads off, eating donuts and drinking coffee—at morning games, you could always expect my family to come equipped with Dunkin Donuts. We call my aunts “The Hyenas” because their laughs could wake somebody out of a coma, and their cheers aren’t much quieter. Whenever I scored, my aunts’ loud shrills threatened to tear down the gym’s roof. But their reaction was nothing compared to my own. I would make a bucket and instantly act like a teenage girl who just met Justin Timberlake. I would start screaming and jumping up and down, and my hand would tremor like an alcoholic taking a day off from drinking. All the while a ginormous smile would stay plastered on my face. “I’m pretty good,” I would think. Looking back, the defense could only play in the paint and I was only making my baskets on an 8-foot hoop. Even then, I wasn’t making very many baskets. Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought. But that wasn’t the point. This was first-grade basketball. We were mostly just there to have fun. Except for one person.

A man I’ll call Steve (I’ll leave his real name out of this for his sake) ran the youth league I played in. There were rumors that Steve pocketed a lot of the concession money that was supposed to go to the church we played in, but I don’t think there was any proof. All I knew for sure about Steve were three things: 1) he was my mother’s cousin, a scary thought, 2) he believed the gym we played in was his own personal gym (it wasn’t), and 3) he would not allow anybody to wear hats in what he called “my gym.” He became known as The Hat Nazi. It didn’t matter if you were the First Lady of the United States of America—if you wore a hat into Steve’s gym, he was going to A) scream at you, and then B) steal it right off the top of your head. Some people collect Pez dispensers or rare bottles of wine; Steve collected other people’s hats. His collection grew every weekend when we played games. After a while, most kids learned not to wear their hats to the gym. But every once in a while somebody would forget, or somebody would come to the gym for the first time, or somebody would get brave and try to test Steve—and Steve would inevitably snatch their hat right off their head, with a scowl on his face that said “This little fucker tried to put one over on me.” I think Steve would eventually give the hats back at the end of the season. Or maybe he would even give them back the same day he took them. I don’t know. In my mind, he kept them forever and still has them hidden in a back room somewhere in his house, where he occasionally looks at the collection, puts his pinky finger to his mouth, laughs an evil laugh, and reminisces about better days. In retrospect, it was a wonder nobody’s father socked him one for stealing a child’s hat.

There was no epic hat scene on the day of my championship game, at least not that I remember. All I remember, besides my family’s support, was the basketball. We went back and forth with the other team all game long. Ben would make a no-look assist and we would surge ahead. Marc would airmail a medieval catapult shot and we would fall behind. I scored something like four points, my cousin John scored something like six, and the Yellow Team became champions by a score of something like 22-18. Not even the Milwaukee Bucks could win that ugly. But we were winners, and even at that age, that mattered.

The Hyenas roared. Buddy remained in his bleacher seat, with one leg crossed over the other and a coffee in his right hand. Steve scoured the area for hats. The refs were relieved my family decided to take it easy. My hand trembled, I hopped up and down like a kangaroo, and the smile wouldn’t leave my face.

I had completed my first season of basketball, and I was a champion. If only winning always came so easy.

Read the previous chapter here: Chapter 1.

It was the cardinal sin, if not in team sports than in basketball, if not in basketball than certainly for the Ubuntu Boston Celtics—playing for oneself rather than one’s team, playing for a contract rather than wins. And in a twisted irony that was heart-wrenching, frustrating and sad, Glen Davis did not just hurt his team, but also himself and his contract situation.

“To me, I thought it was more in between his ears than his play,” Doc Rivers told WEEI. “I thought the whole contract thing affected his play. I thought he had the wrong focus at times because of that. I think when you stray away from just being a team player and being the role that you’re given, I think you struggle. I think all players do. And I thought Baby did that.”

Reading Rivers’ comments, one senses Davis may have played his final game in Boston. Rivers felt Davis gained weight by the end of the season. He felt Davis was playing selfishly. He and Davis have always bumped heads; hell, Davis even began this season—on the very first day of training camp—by calling Doc out, saying he never understood his role. But these comments by Doc were different. This wasn’t just a half-joking barb about Davis’s weight; it was a public attack at what he deemed an insufficient attitude.

“I thought scoring was way too important to him, instead of being who he is,” Rivers continued. “Baby’s never going to be a great scorer in our league, but he can score. What Baby has to be is an energy player, a guy who takes charges. When you look at his charge numbers from the first 40 games and then the last 40, they’re cut down, he got very few of them. I thought a lot of that had to do with he became in thought offensively instead of being an energy player.”

Two seasons ago, after a 2008-’09 campaign that saw Davis fill in admirably for Kevin Garnett, he thought he had earned a larger contract. He entered the summer as a restricted free agent and figured teams would throw money at him—after all, he had averaged 15 points and 6 rebounds during the playoffs. He had hit a game-winner against Orlando. Yeah, he had accidentally run over a kid afterward, but wasn’t that just part of his fun-loving appeal? He was young, his game had improved swiftly and emphatically, and the money was sure to come flying his way in bunches. But being a restricted free agent doesn’t always work out well.

Danny Ainge and the Celtics bided their time, playing things cool, letting other teams establish Davis’s market. Except no other teams offered him a contract. Anderson Varejao earned $42.5 million. Charlie Villanueva, $35 million. Chris Anderson, $26 million. Brandon Bass, $18 million. But, whether it was because the Celtics were expected to match any offer or because undersized power forwards are a dime a dozen, not a single team offered Davis a contract. He was left to sign with the Celtics—two years, $5 million,with incentives to make the deal as much as $6 million if he kept his weight down. Or, in other words, nowhere near the type of money Davis thought he had earned.

Since then, one got the feeling Davis was always upset with his role. Not just because he wasn’t sure what that role was, but because he had proven he could start in this league yet had no chance to start in Boston—not as long as Kevin Garnett still wore Green. Davis considered himself a starter, wanted to start, would have given anything to start. But fate and the limitations of restricted free agency left him earning less money than he expected, playing fewer minutes than he had hoped, taking a step back in what he thought was going to be another breakout year. Still, he and Nate Robinson won Game 4 of the NBA Finals almost by themselves. Davis’s energy was crucial to Boston’s second unit. He became Shrek overnight, a press conference sensation, and he was already a fan favorite, a key element to Boston’s title chances even if his role wasn’t exactly what he wanted. If only he had seen things that way.

This past season still started out so well, but somewhere in midseason—and the slide began earlier than most observers thought—the weight of expectations and the pressure of playing in another contract season cracked Glen Davis. He began taking long jumpers early in the shot clock. He stopped rebounding. His charges taken, as Rivers noted, dropped severely. Twice, Davis lost track of who he was (not to mention his mind) and fired three-pointers at pivotal moments of games—one of the errant long bombs was against Memphis and lost Boston the game, on a final play designed for Paul Pierce or Ray Allen. The hero complex had gotten the best of Davis. A player who had succeeded because of his energy and willingness to contribute the little things suddenly thought he was above all that. He played with the trigger-happy right hand of a star, often taking more shots than any of his better and more accomplished teammates.

“He can help us or any other team,” Rivers said. “But, to me, only if he plays the right way.”

He didn’t always play the right way, didn’t always make the right play. Still, after a season that saw him drive down his value, after being sent home far too early for vacation, Davis wanted to talk about a starting role.

“I know I can (be a starter). It’s not a think or a feel. I know I can,” Davis told MassLive. “I want to be a player in this league. I feel like I’ve got a lot more to offer. I want to show the world my talents, whether it’s here in Boston, or wherever.”

What went left unsaid was that he desperately tried showing the world his talents this year in Boston. Instead, he just exposed himself and minimized his next contract. Nonetheless, the comment summarized Davis’s entire second half of the season. He was no longer happy playing for a contender, not if that meant he came off the bench. He could have been invaluable as a sixth man—hell, for a while, he was—but in his mind, at least, Davis had outgrown that role (no pun intended).

He doesn’t want to come off the bench anymore and he wants to make more money; neither of those things are likely to happen in Boston.

Sometimes, it’s mutually beneficial to part ways.

The Cleveland Cavaliers won the first pick in this summer’s draft, meaning Dan Gilbert’s “I PERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT THE CLEVELAND CAVALIERS WILL WIN AN NBA CHAMPIONSHIP BEFORE THE SELF-TITLED FORMER ‘KING’ WINS ONE” plan has taken one step closer to becoming reality. Um, or not. Sadly for Cleveland, they’re about ten players short of a title team. Even more sadly for Cleveland, this draft has no certain saviors.

Anyway, I’m trying something new tonight: a game thread for a game the Celtics aren’t playing in. Leave your comments about Mavericks-Thunder below. I’ve got the Thunder in six because of their athleticism, even if I’m deathly afraid of their late-game execution (or, rather, their late-game battle for the conch). Yes, I just made a “Lord of the Flies” reference. I feel like I’m back in 7th-grade English class.

Have at it in the comment section, folks. I hope this game thread works out.

Lawrence Frank met with the Houston Rockets for a second interview, according to Fox 26 Sports. The Celtics assistant coach is one of three finalists for the Rockets head coaching position, along with Dwane Casey and Kevin McHale. Oddly enough, all three have spent time coaching Kevin Garnett.

While Frank has earned his reputation as a defensive-minded coach who relates well with his players, looks like Doogie Howser and screams like a Banshee on the sidelines, I still wonder if the gap between Frank and Tom Thibodeau is wider than 5,000 Michael Sweetneys.

Keep in mind, opposing stars NEVER went off against Thibodeau’s defense. Thibs was harder to score on than Acie Green. My memory might serve me incorrectly, but I only time remember two times a superstar torched Thibodeau’s defense: when Lebron got out-dueled by Pierce, and when Wade became a superhero to single-handedly win Game 4 in last year’s first round. The Celtics almost always limited Kobe to bad shooting nights. Lebron, too. Wade scored a boatload of points last postseason, but it didn’t matter because his teammates stunk.

Then Kobe had 41 points against the Celtics earlier this season, Derrick Rose went berserk a couple times, and Lebron and Wade had their way with Boston in the playoffs. As a whole, Boston’s defense still performed admirably. But stars got off with ease, and they did it efficiently. That almost never used to happen against Thibodeau.

It may not be Frank’s fault. Boston’s stars were older this year, and it only makes sense that defensive rotations were a step or two slower. The Celtics also missed Kendrick Perkins in the middle and brought a few players off the bench (I won’t name names—*cough* Jeff Green *cough*) who weren’t accustomed to the defensive schemes. Plus, guarding Lebron and Wade in tandem is different than guarding them alone. Again, it’s not like Boston’s defense became horrendous overnight. The team could still get stops. But rather than making things uncomfortable for opposing stars, Boston’s defense let stars be themselves.

Meanwhile, Chicago just effectively made Lebron and Wade non-factors in Game 1 of the ECF (or at least as non-factor-ish as they can get). After that, one has to wonder how much impact Thibodeau and his gameplans had on limiting the opposition’s best players. Because Frank’s defense, though solid and mostly impressive, didn’t get the job done against the game’s brightest stars.