Back To Reality

Jason Kidd, Gary Payton, and Shareef Abdur-Rahim are not walking through that door!

There, I said it. I feel much better now. I gotta say, this is not really like me. I don’t like being the guy that posts other people’s rumors. I don’t like wondering how Boston fans would handle the emotional gymnastics of cheering for a guy that we chanted "wife-beater" at. Typically I prefer to stay in a zone more closely related to reality. I like being that aloof guy on the message board that patiently explains to some 14 year old kid killing time on the RealGM trade checker that Toronto doesn’t want 5 of our worst players, even if they match up perfectly with Vince Carter’s salary. Yes, even if it would be wicked awesome to see Vince in green and white.

But lets face it, we live in a new era where Curt Schilling and Bill Simmons chat on the SOSH message boards and Mark Cuban has his own blog. The Internet isn’t just changing the way we view sports. The Internet takes a funnel and shoves information down our throats. And the more we gulp down, the more we grasp for even more. We have become impatient with page downloading speeds because the next Chad Ford chat question just might have something tangentially related to the Celtics. So I feed the beast, and I post a few trade rumors that vaguely mention some un-confirmable source and it fills up another day, hopefully giving people something fun to talk about.

But at the end of the day, we all know that truth is stranger than fiction. Nobody can envision the deal that Danny is going to make before the end of the summer. Consider the Ricky Davis deal. Personally, I knew he was on the block, but I never for a second thought of him in Boston. When it happened, it took me days to figure out if my non-Celtic-fan friends were right to ridicule Ainge or if there was a deeper purpose to the move. Who am I kidding? I’m still not quite sure what to make of Ricky. I really want to embrace him, but there’s always that shadow of doubt that makes him constantly guilty until he proves his innocence to us for one more day.

We all knew Walker was headed out of town. Visions of blockbusters danced in our heads. When we got back Raef and unknown quantities (Jiri, pick, expiring contract, etc.), we didn’t know exactly what to think. Once again, I’ve embraced some of the results (Jiri, West, Allen), but there is that shadow of doubt around Raef’s health. Not to mention that even when he was healthy, I remember laughing (hard) at Cuban for giving him that contract that now sits on our books.

So maybe these dreamed-up deals are like a kind of escapism technique. We don’t want to think about the shadows that haunt our minds. We’d much rather consider the endless possibilities that continual tinkering and trading could offer us. But dare not tinker too much, lest ye be slapped with the scarlet letter "P" for Pitino.

Anyways, that’s the end of my rant. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming. Take a spin on the trade checker and give us your best trade ideas. We promise not to laugh.