Daily Links 10/7

I’ve yet to read the most important observation from last night’s game. Admittedly, the one team most dramatically changed from last year was the Boston Celtics. The Toronto Gm even commented that Danny did a masterful job in a very difficult salary-cap environement where clubs are reluctant to trade star players.

The Toronto Gm went on to say that the Celtics’ completely overhauled their roster and don’t resemble their former team. He went on to add that that the Raptors’ roster hasn’t changed much and that they pretty much stayed with their youth because of their success last year and his expectations that they will continue to improve.

Now comes the IMPORTANT observation. The “new” Celtics actually played a VETERAN team last night. These guys have already had one year of playing together so they’re likely to play better as a unit.

We learned from the Olympics that winning is not just about collecting talent but rather getting that talent to mesh and blend into a formidable force. It’s important to collect talent but equally important to develop CHEMISTRY.

Therein lies the key to last night. We won with talent that had not yet had the opportunity to develop CHEMISTRY. Further, our team has barely had time to develop anything offensively or defensively except the most basic and simplest strategy. Yet we STILL overcame a formidable advisary, a team which had already developed team chemistry, already developed their offensive and defensive systems over the course of a FULL season.

This should tell us that with continued hard work and unselfish play, we’re going to be a much better team than the one we saw yesterday. Perhaps we haven’t had enough time to allow maturation of Tom Thibodeau’s influence or that of Clifford Ray’s influence on Batista. We may also see subtle changes in the “green”, “white” and “grey” units as the dust settles and talent reveals itself.