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On the NBA front, the Celtics are back in the NBA Finals ! Yes ! What a difference a year makes.

Last year, the Celtics were 29th in the NBA. There were 30 teams. And now.... they're playing the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals. That's the biggest turnaround ever in the history of the NBA. But was it really all done in just one year ?

The NBA is run very differently from football leagues in Europe. There's a salary cap for teams. And you can't buy players, you have to trade them for other players or draft picks. And there's a luxury tax, and you get young players through a yearly draft....... suffice to say, building the personnel for a team is a big job. In fact, all the NBA teams split the job of getting players from the job of coaching players. In the Celtics case, the jobs fall to Danny Ainge and Doc Rivers.

One year ago, the Celtics were hoping for the 1st or 2nd pick in the draft. They had the 2nd highest percentage chance of the 30 teams to get those picks. It would have given them the opportunity to draft Greg Oden or Kevin Durant - so-called 'franchise' players who would have been the main star players of the Celtics for the next 10 years. As it stood, the Celtics ended up with the 5th pick, which was the lowest pick they could get.

So what does, Danny Ainge do ? 4 years of drafting and developing young players, multiple trades, trying to build a team from scratch, taking on big contracts........... and it seemed like they wouldn't be able to make the next step of getting significantly better over the long or short term.
Well, the first thing he did was give up that 5th draft pick and two other players in a trade for Ray Allen, a 7 time all-star shooting guard. That helped Danny boy to persuade Kevin Garnett, a 10 time all-star power forward to move to Boston in another trade. Together with current Celtics small forward Paul Pierce, a 5 time all-star, the Celtics suddenly had a nucleus which had the NBA buzzing.

With that trio in place, veteran players began lining up for a shot at getting an NBA championship : Scott Pollard, Eddie House, James Posey, P.J. Brown, Sam Cassell. Together, these guys helped solidify the rest of the squad. It answered a nagging question that had been raised time and again : "What about the rest of the Boston Celtics team ? Are they good enough to win a championship ?"

Over the course of the season, Doc Rivers has managed that squad all the way to the NBA Finals. So, it does look like the rest of the players are good enough to contend for a championship. And it all started on the day the Celtics got a lousy break and ended up with the 5th pick. That forced Danny Ainge to change course and turn one of the youngest squads in the NBA into one of the oldest........ and they're in the NBA Finals. What a difference a day makes.

And what about the journey ?

Danny Ainge was hired in 2003 and inherited an aging team which had done reasonably well but were simply too limited talent-wise to win the NBA. He declared a 5 year plan for the Celtics to be a legitimate NBA contender and set about executing his plan. The plan was to stockpile picks, draft young players, develop them and eventually trade them for an all star player to play alongside Paul Pierce. Well, it worked out a little better than that : he got 2 all star players to play alongside Paul Pierce.

I've been following them through the growing pains of that young team but would I have foreseen an NBA Final just 1 short year ago ? Not on my life. Oh, you could see that Danny Ainge had a talent for drafting good players (on a relative scale) considering that he usually got only around the 15th pick onwards. (He has a particularly impressive record for drafting under-sized power forwards with 2nd round draft picks : Ryan Gomes, Leon Powe, Glen Davis). And Doc Rivers was doing a decent job of developing that talent, on the most part. But when you looked at that team last year, would you have thought "We're going to be a contender next year" ? Not on your life.

Well, we're in year 5 of Danny Ainge's 5-year plan and there's an NBA Final against the Los Angeles Lakers coming up. He built a young team, he traded that team, and he compiled a team of veteran players. He put his ass on the line by backing up Doc Rivers when some fans wanted the coach fired last season. And he could do all this because the team's ownership were willing to trust in him and put their money where their mouth was. What a difference 5 years makes.

And what a journey.
Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!