Without Red Auerbach, the Boston Celtics would not have become the NBA’s winningest franchise. He drafted Bill Russell. Selected Larry Bird a year before Bird finished college. Traded for Robert Parish and Kevin McHale. Coached the Celtics to nine championships, then won seven more as general manager and team president.

On what would have been Auerbach’s 94th birthday, I include an excerpt from Bill Russell’s book Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend to remind you: sometimes, the genius is in fine print.

To set the stage: The year is 1956. The Celtics are thirsty for a big man and Auerbach is desperate to draft Russell, but the Celtics only have the 7th pick. Ed Macauley’s son is sick and Macauley has requested a trade closer to his St. Louis home; Red also wants to use the draft to send Macauley to the St. Louis Hawks. The St. Hawks hold the 2nd pick, so Red needs to devise a plan to A) trade Macauley to St. Louis, B) bring the Hawks’ 2nd pick to Boston, and C) persuade the Rochester Royals, owners of the 1st pick, not to select Russell.

“First, he called Hawks owner Ben Kerner, a man he’d once coached for and despised. If he could maneuver Kerner off [Russell], that would suit Red just fine. So he offered up Macauley, his best shooter, and the Celtics’ seventh pick in the draft in return for St. Louis’s rights to pick second. But Ben Kerner knew he had Red over a barrel. So he demanded more. He wanted to throw in Cliff Hagan, a promising young forward to Kentucky. At that juncture, Celtics owner Walter Brown told Red, ‘You can’t trade Ed Macauley! He’s our best player!’ But then Red had Ed Macauley tell Walter personally, ‘I want you to trade me to St. Louis. You’d be doing me a favor, because then I can take care of my son and still play pro ball.’ That was enough for Walter; he wore his empathy on his sleeve anyway.

“St. Louis was satisfied. Now for the coup de grace: the Rochester Royals. They had first pick, so what could Red possibly do to keep them from saying, ‘Rochester selects Bill Russell’? The Royals already had Maurice Stokes, a great young center who was leading the league in rebounds, so Red figured they didn’t need another big center like me. So he persuaded Walter Brown to call Rochester owner Les Harrison with an unusual proposition. Walter said, ‘Listen, Les. I’m the president of the Ice Capades. If you lay off Russell at Number one, just pick the date and I’ll throw the Ice Capades in your building for two weeks.’ This was Red’s almost compulsively innovative genius working overtime. He knew that in the off-season back then, a lot of those big arenas sat empty. Having the Ice Capades in your building for two weeks was like having the Harlem Globetrotters: guaranteed sellouts every night—and you’ve made a profit for the year! Of course, Harrison bit. He was a businessman, and for him, this was good business.”

And with that, the Celtics secured the draft rights to Bill Russell, set the foundation for the team’s first 11 championships, and marked Red Auerbach as one hombre you don’t want to negotiate with. Even when you win against Red — I’m sure the Ice Capades made Les Harrison a bundle of cash — you lose.

Happy birthday, Red. Smoke a stogey for me.

Editor’s note: This is the next chapter of a book I’m writing this summer. You can read the previous chapters here: The Preface. Chapter 1. Chapter 2.

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

– Jay

*****

When you’re beginning the first day of second grade, you worry about the important things: do my New Balance sneakers look good with my Umbro shorts? Did any girls get cuter over the summer, even if I don’t have the courage to talk to them no matter what? My mom packed string cheese and Hi-C Ecto Cooler for snack, right? Is my desk near any of my friends? Do I have any food stuck in my teeth?

So when I saw James Chen for the first time, wearing a backpack with Chinese symbols on it, donning some strange combination of clothes that was more Samurai warrior than suburban Massachusetts second grader, head and shoulders taller than every other second grader and even the third and fourth graders, being walked into class by his parents, who seemed tall enough that they could reach up and burn their fingers on the sun, I was too preoccupied to understand that I had just caught a glimpse of my first best friend.

If I had met James later in life, we never would have become friends. Not because I became less open-minded in the coming years, but because later in life, you become content with your own group of friends, your own life. James moved to Longmeadow without knowing a single word of English. The seven-year old me saw that as something intriguing, something new and exciting, something that made me eager to invite James to my house and to help him develop his English skills and to embrace him as my friend. The current me would have seen James’s choppy (at best) English and seen it as a barrier keeping us from becoming friends, then went back to my own familiar group of friends to drink a few beers and play a round of golf.

But I was seven years old then, and James, with his Chinese speech, Chinese snacks and Chinese clothes, was the most interesting person I had ever met. It took less than a week for me to invite him over my house. He still couldn’t speak but he could write fluently, and my mom brought a chalk easel for him to spell his thoughts. On that easel, I learned that James and I had more in common than I thought. At the risk of making James sound like a stereotype, he excelled at math and was more driven to succeed than any student in my class. I would later grow into a teacher’s worst nightmare – a lazy underachiever always prepared with a wise-ass quip (one teacher used to make me stand in a chalk circle at the back of the classroom, with my back facing the class and my nose at the wall) – but in second grade, I was like James, smart and driven, the type of student who made a teacher’s job simple. More importantly to our friendship, of course, James shared my love of basketball. His father had played for the Chinese National Basketball Team and James loved the sound of ball snapping through net, that beautiful symphony, as much as I did. So we put the easel aside and brought a couple basketballs out of the garage to shoot around.

Not to sound corny, but, well, I’m about to sound corny: when we shot around that day, the first time I shared a basketball court with my new best friend James Chen, we both spoke the same language. I’ve heard people say you can learn more about someone while shooting around for half an hour than you can by speaking to them for an entire day. Maybe that’s true, maybe not, but shooting does offer a window into a person’s personality. If both rebounds bounce in the same spot, does the person rebound his own first and let you get yours? Or does he rebound your ball first, pass it to you, then chase after his own? Does he say thanks when you rebound his misses? Chide himself after missing shots? The answers to those questions might not define a person’s character. But they mean something.

James was tall, a Sequoia tree compared to me, but his jump shot floated toward the rim like a feather dropped from above. He did not say thanks after I rebounded his misses, but that’s because he still did not speak a word of English. When my rebounds dropped anywhere in his vicinity, James chased them down. His passes hit me right in the fingertips, the seams already lined up for my shots. James was well-schooled by his basketball-playing father, I could tell instantly. He could also shoot. A center by height, a point guard by desire, James let fly with outside shots that did not even wake the net as they fell through. When James missed, he muttered to himself. I could not understand what he was saying, since it was in Chinese, but from the tone I knew he hated missing shots. This interesting kid, this new Chinese boy, my first best friend, my team’s next starting center, was a fierce competitor.

He was also a smart competitor. In second grade, I still played in-town basketball, the same league my team had won the season before. The league had a rule about coaches: if two or more parents decided to coach together, their sons would all be on the same team. Naturally, since winning and losing is supposed to mean nothing at that age, assistant coaches almost always had All-Star sons. The rule was only one of the league’s odd ones, another being that there were no traveling violation calls. Because his services were a package deal with his son, there was almost a full-fledged steel-caged match to recruit Mr. Chen as an assistant coach. He couldn’t commit any time whatsoever to coaching and probably wouldn’t even be able to attend any games, but his son was a 5’6 second grader with range to the three-point arc  – thus, Mr. Chen became the most prized recruit in town. Eventually, he chose to coach my team. I think Mr. Chen decided to coach my team (and I say the term coach in its loosest fashion) because I was his son’s best friend in town. Or maybe it was the fully-loaded Lexus and mysterious duffle bag filled with $30,000 that changed his mind. One way or the other, James became my teammate.

Our team (the blue team) advanced to the semifinals, and we were the clear favorites. But everything fell apart on a Saturday morning. My whole family attended the semifinals, most of them sipping Dunkin Donuts coffee – when they weren’t screaming at the refs, at least. In my second year, I had stopped shaking like a massage chair every time I scored a bucket. I had grown too cool for that. Instead, after every make, I grinned like I had just met Santa Claus. But that day, I didn’t do much grinning and neither did my teammates.

We were a star-studded team, the cream of the crop, the Larry Bird-Kevin McHale-Robert Parish Boston Celtics playing against a bunch of teams that were more like the Beno Udrih-Omri Casspi-Tyreke Evans Sacramento Kings. But some days, the ball just doesn’t fall, and that Saturday was one of those days. The game went back and forth, brick after brick, turnover after turnover, like a “Tony Allen’s Greatest Bloopers” clip. Eventually my team fell behind by one point. I don’t remember the exact score, but it couldn’t have been much more than 16-15. We fouled the other team with five seconds left, and we needed a miss. It came, and James corralled the rebound. In a flash of brilliance, perhaps the most intelligent play a seven-year old ever made, James remembered the “no traveling violations” rule.

In five seconds or less, James needed to drain a shot to win the game and send us to the finals, where we would have been favorites again. When he calculated the fastest route to the other hoop, he realized dribbling would have only wasted time. The refs didn’t call traveling anyway, so James cradled the ball in his right arm and took off as quickly as he could. He sprinted for the other hoop, all 5’6 of him, his jet black hair standing at attention, opponents trying to keep up, their heads at his shoulders, necks craned up watching this Asian blur pass them by. I watched, stunned, as James carried the ball like a football player, high-stepping his way to the other end. His decision to forego dribbling wasn’t just wise, it was brilliant. In less than five seconds he sprinted downcourt, made a layup, and then celebrated like only a child could, jumping up and down and waving his arms in the air, like a pogo stick flagging down a cab. A few years later, James would learn the Walker Wiggle while rooting for the Celtics and his celebrations would become more choreographed.  But then, Walker was still at Kentucky and when James celebrated, he just looked like a man in extreme distress. Not that it mattered. The blue team had won, James and I had prevailed.

But in that moment while James celebrated, while the other team started wailing, while my aunts, uncles, mom and dad all stood and cheered on the sideline, spilling only a little bit of their Dunkin Donuts coffee, the two referees convened at mid-court.

“Traveling,” one of them said after a few moments.

“There’s no such thing as traveling in this league!” shouted my coach. “We won! We won!”

Winning didn’t matter at that age, remember?

“The traveling rule was made for kids who can’t dribble,” replied one of the refs. “Not for the most skilled player in the league. The basket doesn’t count.”

And with that, two referees wiped away the most intelligent play a second-grader ever made. James cried. He could have dribbled if he wanted to. He could have still made the shot. I walked over and gave my best friend a hug.

A few years later, James and I began our own business. We sold basketball cards online at a website called Courtside Cards. James created the website himself. He was 11 years old.

We were positive the website would make us millions, and two months after we created it, I received my very first pay check. It was for 31 cents. The check came in the mail. James’s father had gotten a job as a professor at Towson State, and the Chens had moved to Baltimore.

It was time to find a new best friend.

Thirty-seven years after Boston last hosted an NBA All-Star game, Mayor Thomas Menino stated his desire to bring the NBA’s most worthless exhibition back to Bean Town. (Boston Globe)

The city has not hosted an All-Star game since 1964, when Bill Russell, Sam Jones and Tommy Heinsohn represented the Celtics for the Eastern Conference. The East prevailed by a 111-107 score and the MVP honors went to Oscar Robertson, who, not very surprisingly, posted a near-triple double. The Western Conference All-Stars featured Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, and a lesser-known player named Don Ohl who was nicknamed Waxie due to his crew cut. In case you were wondering.

The Celtics will need to complete a formal proposal to bring the game back to Boston. The large financial commitment has been a barrier keeping many teams from hosting the event. The NBA also tends to host All-Star Games in warm climates, and Boston in February doesn’t exactly have beach weather. But according to the Boston Globe, Wyc Grousbeck said the Celtics are interested in joining the rotation.

Larry Bird regards Michael Cooper as the best defender he ever played. Considering the way Cooper prepared for Bird, that makes sense.

“I used to study games of his,” Cooper told ESPN’s Brian Kamenetzy during a podcast. “It would be a month before we would play the Celtics, but I was getting ready for him. Watching him play.”

The way Cooper describes watching Bird play, he used a far more detailed process than the way most people watch basketball games. He noted what Bird did on out of bounds passes, and the way Bird moved around picks. He dissected which way Bird preferred to drive and what shots he liked in certain situations. According to one Celtics-Lakers game broadcast, Cooper  owned 50 game tapes of Larry Bird.

But Bird’s game was so complete, his arsenal so varied, his repertoire so ambidextrous, that Cooper could hardly find any tendencies to build on.

“Larry was naturally born left-handed, and taught himself how to shoot right handed,” Cooper said. “He was very ambidextrous so you couldn’t force him one way or the other, because he was just as good going to his left as he was to his right. The only tendencies I had [available from film] to pick up with him was how he came off of picks. How he set you up to come off a pick.”

Cooper’s hands used to sweat profusely prior to facing Bird, which he considered a sign that he was ready to play, and he once compared defending Bird to the Christian entering the arena to face the lions.

“But I have an idea of how to defense the lion,” he said.

And the lion held a world of respect for the Christian, even if the lion always wanted to kick the Christian’s ass.

With the NBA locked out, Basketball Jesus, or if you prefer, Larry Bird, will grace the NBA 2k12 cover. Which means I will buy an NBA video game for the first time since Sebastian Telfiar was Boston’s starting point guard.

The NBA will also sell two alternate covers — one featuring Michael Jordan, the other featuring Magic Johnson. It’s unclear whether Jordan will be photographed in a jersey that says “Roster #99.” (Note: if you didn’t play video games in the nineties, that last joke probably makes as much sense as signing Brendan Haywood to a $55 million contract.)

I know why I dislike Jeff Green, and it’s not just because he underwhelmed last season in Boston. Considering that he entered a vastly different role, played the understudy to a whole slew of All-Stars, and learned both a new offense and a complicated defense on the run, his relative failures should have been expected (at least to an extent).

No, I don’t dislike Green because he played poorly last season. Hell, I don’t even dislike him because the Celtics relied on him and he failed to provide much (or sometimes any) help. I don’t dislike him because some people still overlook his advanced statistics, which say and have always said that Green’s a mediocre, inefficient player.  I don’t dislike him because he shames Antoine Walker’s old number eight (alright, that’s just a joke) and I don’t dislike him because the Celtics traded away one of my favorite players to acquire him.

I dislike Jeff Green because he never seems to try. A rebound ricochets off the rim and Green might watch it fall, almost as if the rebound were a rain drop and Green were standing underneath a balcony trying to avoid it. The rest of the Celtics rotate seamlessly on defense, but there’s Green, hugging his man. He doesn’t always miss rebounds and he doesn’t always miss rotations, but Green does so enough to let us believe he’s not putting in the required effort. To make matters worse, we can see talent in him, we can see his potential, we can see that he possesses a lot of the skills to become a stud.

But everything Green does on the basketball court—whether he rises into the stratosphere to slam down an alley-oop dunk or falls to the floor after being bullied for a rebound—comes equipped with the same blank stare. The lack of facial expressions doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Tim Duncan, except for his incessant whining to officials, rarely shows his emotions on the court. Derrick Rose’s face looks almost vacant most of the time. And the next on-court smile you see from Rajon Rondo will be his first. But when Green couples his “dear in the headlights” look with his “out for a morning jog” pace of play, his startlingly nonchalant disposition makes you wonder if he really doesn’t care.

Last night at an awards ceremony, Larry Bird discussed the tail end of his career, when Kevin McHale broke his foot, Robert Parish suffered nagging injuries and Bird himself was barely healthy enough to walk to the team bus after games. Knowing what Bird knew—that his body wasn’t ever going to improve, neither would his teammates’, and together they would limp into retirement (or, in Parish’s case, a form of semi-retirement that allowed him to play a limited role for several more years)—a reporter asked Bird if he would have broken up The Original Big Three sooner in an effort to rebuild.

“Absolutely not,” Bird was quoted by ESPN. “That’s what Boston stands for. Respect. If you give it all you’ve got, play as hard as you can, [the fans] will come out and support you. Not only for that game, for your whole career. I know, I lived it.”

If you give it all you’ve got, play as hard as you can, we will support you. That’s why I still adore Eddie House but feel disgusted on a regular basis while watching Jeff Green. That’s why I can put up with Jermaine O’Neal but couldn’t stand Rasheed Wallace. That’s why James Posey became a faux legend and its why we can overlook Delonte West’s personal struggles and its why Ryan Gomes will still get an ovation every time he comes to Boston.

The best experiment to test Bird’s hypothesis might have been conducted by Nate Robinson. From a “rooting for the Celtics” standpoint, I should have loathed a lot Robinson offered. He loved shooting bad shots; in multiple cases, a three-on-one fast break became Robinson’s latest 27-foot pull-up jumper. He often got tortured on defense. I can vividly recall one five-minute span when J.J. Barea made Robinson look like a blind kindergartener.  In retrospect, after Barea played a crucial role for the NBA champions, Robinson’s humiliating stretch doesn’t seem quite as bad. But believe me, Robinson got a free clinic that day in how to succeed as a Lilliputian. Perhaps even more frustrating, Robinson didn’t know how to run an offense, he was 5’7, and the most lasting thing he has ever done in basketball (and I imagine the most lasting thing he will ever do) was win three slam dunk championships. He can fly into the sky, he can score, but winning basketball? It was, and is, largely foreign to him.

But he played hard. Even when Robinson failed to make his way over a screen, he tried. Even when he missed a layup, he bounded off bigger, stronger defenders just to get there. Even when he pulled up for a three-pointer on a fast break, I got the sinking feeling he actually thought it was a good idea. And so I didn’t mind him. I never loved him, but I couldn’t find it within myself to dislike a player who A) played his pants off every time he stepped on the court, and B) cheered for his teammates like a 13-year old fan no matter how many successive minutes he sat on the bench.

In December, I compared Nate Robinson to a troublemaker I dealt with during my lifeguarding days. (Celtics Blog)

The third troublemaker, I didn’t hate. Not at all. Maybe I should have. This kid would break every pool rule, every single day. I would tell him to walk, and 0.2 seconds later he’d be sprinting full speed. I’d tell him to stop splashing, and the next thing I knew his friends would be under a barrage of splashing water. I’d tell him not to do a back flip, and — wouldn’t you know it? — his next dive would be a back flip.

But there was a difference to the third boy’s troublemaking — it was all in good fun. He wasn’t annoying, and he wasn’t choking out any of his friends. Mostly, he didn’t harm anything or anybody at all. He just broke a lot of rules because he was a free spirit, because he was so excited to swim in the pool he couldn’t contain himself. Every time he broke a rule, he’d get a look on his face, like, “Oops. I can’t believe I just did that. I’m so sorry.” And he always had a smile on his face, so I couldn’t stay mad at this kid. I just couldn’t, no matter how many rules he broke. It wasn’t entirely his fault. He just couldn’t help himself.

In case you are still wondering, the third boy is the swimming pool equivalent of Nate Robinson. Nate does some really stupid things on a basketball court. He loves pulling up for threes on 1-on-3 fast breaks. He occasionally makes dumb passes, and his height can hinder him defensively. There was one play Sunday when Robinson took a shot, over his head, literally without even looking at the hoop. It hit the side of the backboard and bounced off, and I imagine Doc Rivers sat on the sideline shaking his head in disbelief.

But I can’t stay mad at Nate. Because on that very same play, Nate chased down his rebound and somehow passed it to Ray Allen in the corner, who made a bucket. The play after that, Nate made a nice defensive play which resulted in a fast break lay-in. A quarter or two later, a loose ball bounced on the court, and three differentIndiana Pacers were in pursuit. Naturally, Nate, farthest away from the ball, dove on the floor and beat all three Pacers to it. Two or three plays after THAT, Nate dove into the first row of the stands, after a ball he probably never had a chance of reaching.

What I’m trying to say is this: Nate Robinson is not the world’s smartest basketball player, nor is he anywhere close to it. But I can live with his occasional brain farts because I know everything he does has the right intention, because he does it all with a smile on his face, and because no matter how many times he screws up, I know he’s actually trying as hard as he possibly can. He loves basketball, loves being part of a winner, and plays with the exuberance of Pool Troublemaker #3.

I imagine players don’t care very much whether a young blogger for some fan-run website called “Celtics Town” appreciates their style of play. But if for some reason Jeff Green did care, I would tell him to play with more passion. I would tell him to chase down rebounds like they were the girl of his dreams. I would tell him to defend opponents like his next meal depended on it. I would tell him to smile, to scream, to display emotion, to dive on the floor. The smiling and screaming part doesn’t actually have anything to do with success, but at least it would show us he cares.

There was a scene in “Jerry McGuire” when sports agent Jerry McGuire tells his football-playing client Rod Tidwell why the Arizona Cardinals haven’t offered him a big contract.

“I’ll tell you why you don’t have your ten million dollars yet,” Jerry said. “Right now, you are a paycheck player. You play with your head, not your heart. Your personal life, heart. But when you get on the field, it’s all about what you didn’t get, who’s to blame, who overthrew the pass, who’s got the contract you don’t, who’s not giving you your love. You know what, that is NOT what inspires people. That is not what inspires people. Just shut up, play the game, play it from your heart. And you know what? I will show you the ‘coin’ (money). And that’s the truth, man. That’s the truth. Can you handle it?”

How am I going to support paying Jeff Green this summer when everything he does tells me he’s a paycheck player? Play the game, Jeff, play it from your heart. And then I will feel comfortable showing you the coin.