bill simmons cries his readers a river; unfortunately, he is unable to build a bridge or get over it

before i begin, two things-

first, danbob will be posting scarcely (if at all) for the next three weeks. but don’t worry, all you ladies out there in the “danbob’s groupies” fan club, he’s just on vacation! hell be back with his same sexy, witty commentary sometime in june.

second, this post will end up being extremely long. if you don’t want to read the whole thing, at least read these first 5 paragraphs (the stuff from before i even get into the simmons article). the point i’m making in them is very near and dear to me and if everyone who reads espn.com joined me in also making it to the sports guy (i email him about it pretty regularly), the world would be a better place. on the other hand, if you do want to read the whole thing but decide that because of its length a good way to do so is to print it out and read it on the toilet like simmons’ readers always tell him they do in his “mailbag” columns, you are weird. please stop coming here, or send me an email to justify this behavior. now for the show:


this is such a great, great day. as i stated in the comments section of my marty burns article from tuesday, i was eagerly anticipating this piece right here. from the moment that night when the #5 lottery envelope was revealed to contain that stupid smirking leprechaun in boston’s logo, i knew simmons would be delivering me a big juicy fastball of an article right down the middle of the plate sometime before the week was out. and he most certainly did not disappoint.

before i go into it, allow me to vent briefly about how STUPID it is for simmons to write as many columns as he does about the celtics. bill, i have bad news for you: no one cares. (see the first post ever on this blog for confirmation that i have felt this way for some time. well, since may 14th anyways.) here’s how i know:

i’m from denver, a city surprisingly full of transplants. its been growing very steadily for the last 20 years or so and thus has brought in a large number of people from california, texas, the east coast, even parts of the midwest. what this does, from a sports angle, is make my favorite local teams’ home games pretty agonizing to attend from time to time because the stadium/arena is packed with fans rooting for the visiting team. sure, they live in denver now, but they still identify with the teams they grew up cheering for. and they’re not afraid to show it.

ive been to rockies games with a crowd split close to 50/50 between their fans and the those of the visiting team. and we're not just talking about the cubs and braves, who have very large fan bases all over the country. were talking about the diamondbacks, padres, mariners, reds, astros, mets… even the marlins. and it doesn’t matter if those teams are struggling; they still get a pretty good turnout of transplanted fans at coors field. exact same thing goes for the nuggets. sure, there are tons of lakers fans anywhere you go. but ive been to games at pepsi center that featured oodles of bulls fans, heat fans (well before their title last year), sixers fans, timberwolves fans, and rockets fans. and again, this has happened even when the visiting team was having a down year. its something i’ve gotten used to.

but here’s the problem with simmons, explained in a simple story- this past december i made my way back to colorado from my current home in DC for the holidays. i wanted to catch a nuggets game and it just so happened they were playing the celtics during the week between christmas and new years. being an avid hater of boston’s teams, i prepared myself for the worst; legions of green shirted drunken idiots shouting “wicked awesome” and turning all their rs into ahs. but wouldn’t you know it- not only did the nuggets blow out the celtics that night, there was nary a masshole in sight. it was shocking. i’m not exaggerating just because i want to slam simmons and the celtics- it truly was one of the least-attended-by-fans-of-the-visiting-team rockies or nuggets games ive ever been to. and for what its worth, assuming that at least some of them are originally from boston, there’s no shortage of red sox fans in denver. i can promise you that based on a red sox/rockies game in went to in june 2004. it felt like i was watching the game in fenway park. so therefore i must conclude: NO ONE CARES ABOUT THE CELTICS. although it bugs me, i can tolerate espn’s overblown coverage of the yankees and red sox. i know tons of people care about that. and i can even deal with the disproportionate attention they give the lakers and cowboys. i guess. but simmons, the celtics? youre kidding yourself. start acting like a national sportswriter and report on something more than 2% of your readership gives a shit about. we know you hate doc rivers. we know you long for the days of kevin mchale and larry bird. but we are sick and tired of hearing about it once a month from november until june.

ok now on with the pity party.

Welcome to the next decade of discontent

that’s right, celtics fans- put the next 10 years in a metaphorical envelope, stick a stamp on it, and mail them in. there is no hope whatsoever that the celtics will ever be good during that span. only kevin durant or greg oden could have assured that outcome. we'd have been talking about at least 26 titles by 2017. but now, were talking about zero. probably no winning seasons. hell, they’ll be lucky to win a single game. might as well move the team to vegas- you’ve been there a few times, haven’t you bill?

In "Crimes and Misdemeanors," Alan Alda's character defines comedy as equaling "tragedy plus time." So eventually, I'll find the following story funny. Just not right now. But here's the story …

for anyone who hates simmons and the celtics like i do, the amount of time in question was almost zero seconds.

Tuesday afternoon, my father and I were watching ESPN's "2007 NBA Draft Lottery" special. The show started at 1:30 p.m. and ran for 90 minutes, causing Dad to sarcastically wonder, "Is anyone else watching this show right now?" even though he ended up watching the whole thing. He didn't seem to grasp the irony. Midway through the show, ESPN ran a feature on Chinese prospect Yi Jianlian, a 7-foot forward who moves reasonably well for a big man. Desperate for Yi tape that didn't have the grainy quality of the Zapruder film, ESPN showed footage from a recent workout in which Yi completed a series of drills against a trainer who couldn't have been taller than 5-foot-9. At one point, Yi posted up the tiny trainer, then whirled around, zoomed by the poor guy and dunked with his left hand.

"Whoa, he went right by that guy," Dad joked.

This made us giggle. After that, every time Yi made a jumper or beat an i’maginary defender off the dribble, we reacted like it was the Slam Dunk Contest.

Ooooooooooooh!

Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

that sounds hiiiigh-larious. also, i forgot to mention, bill- not only does no one care about the celtics, they also don’t care about your family and friends. not your dad, not the sports gal (although i admit, she can write a pretty decent pop culture column), not your daughter, not even your buddies j-bug and hench. yet sadly i get the feeling well be hearing about some, if not ALL, of the characters on that list before this article is done. welcome to sports guy’s world. i mean, do even big fans of simmons like hearing about these people? do they sit around wondering who hench picked in the 4th round of his fantasy football draft or whether or not the sports gal is a good driver?

After three minutes of workout highlights, Dad decided Yi reminded him of Brad Lohaus. It wasn't a compliment. Then, Chad Ford appeared via satellite and confessed that he was completely sold on Yi, maintaining that Yi's personality was different than overwhelmed foreign players from years past, even adding, "He lives in L.A. and attends premieres and parties, he's already living the life of an NBA star." Let's just say that we weren't too swayed. That was followed by the obligatory Nikoloz Tskitishvili reference -- after all, he's the worst-case scenario for any foreign pick, right? -- and some old-school Tskitishvili highlights while Chad talked. Finally, they threw it back to the studio where ESPN's experts, including former Nuggets GM Kiki Vandeweghe, who drafted Tschkivili over Amare Stoudemire four years ago (a decision that earned him a spot on this particular show), broke down Yi's game.

i can promise you that drafting tskitishvili is not the reason vandeweghe was let go by the nuggets. not only were the two events separated by more than 4 years, vandeweghe also drafted carmelo anthony, traded for kenyon martin (a good move at the time), signed andre miller, hired george karl, and traded for marcus camby. but sure. go ahead and take a shot at him. you probably wish you had his TV job.

It was a startling sequence. Ever decide before a Vegas trip that you're bringing a certain amount of cash (let's say $750) and maxing out your daily ATM limit ($500) no more than twice? It's called a "preemptive worst-case scenario." In other words, you determine beforehand that you're allowing yourself to lose only $1,750 and not a nickel more. For the rest of the weekend, that number hangs over everything. You've given yourself a salary cap for failure. Well, by the time they reached commercial, Dad and I had determined our preemptive worst-case scenario for the 2007 lottery: The Celtics dropping to No. 5, followed by Danny Ainge talking himself into Yi Jianlian.

ok, non-sarcastically, the celtics falling to no. 5 really actually was the worst case scenario. but then, to make drafting yi as part of said scenario? good point bill. clearly you know everything about him and whether or not he’ll be successful in the NBA based on a 5 minute TV spot. i think its safe to assume he will bust exactly like tschkitishvili did. when’s the last time a good NBA player came out of china?

Fast-forward to 10:30 Tuesday night: I'm sitting at the Four's with my buddies JackO and J-Bug.

where the hell was hench? wife probably had him by the balls and wouldn’t let him go out.

We had just arrived from Sully's Tap next door, which lived up to its reputation as the single most depressing bar in Boston. In fact, that's why we went there, because I asked Bug right after the lottery, "Take me to the most depressing bar in Boston" and he quickly responded, "Sullivan's Tap!" That's not a diss on Sully's --

sounds like it is. there is definitely a difference, at least in my mind, between a depressing bar and a dive bar. but this is bill’s sob story so i won’t hold this against him.

we love that place, it's everything a dive bar should be. But you'd never go there for the atmosphere. After watching the Celtics logo get pulled out of the No. 5 envelope, Sully's Tap felt like the perfect destination for a rebound beer.

In retrospect, any Boston bar would have worked because all of them were morbidly depressing. For all intent and purpose, professional basketball had just been murdered in the city of Boston.

i will not make a tactless point here about an actual player being murdered, which as we all know tragically happens from time to time. i will make this point though- remember when the baltimore colts packed up and moved to indy? or when the old browns went to baltimore? or when all those canadian/northern US hockey teams packed up and moved to places like charlotte, phoenix, and dallas? that, bill, is a sport being (sort of) “murdered” in a city. not dropping 3 spots in one of the deepest nba drafts in years. needless to say, the analogy is excessively hyperbolic. unless bill has some kind of magic future seeing machine that i don’t know about, how does he know the guy at #5 wont end up leading the celtics to playoff success? this is equivalent to a kid wanting a 15 speed bike for christmas, then throwing a fit and claiming the whole year is ruined because he gets a 10 speed.

Ever since Larry Legend's retirement, the Celtics had suffered one blow after another -- Reggie Lewis, Dave Gavitt, the Garden, M.L., Duncan, Pitino -- and just when things were finally turning around, our overmatched front office turned four first-rounders into two veteran bench players (one who played for the team for four months), then compounded the mistake by trading for a recovering alcoholic making max money. Ainge took over and blew up everything, fired the coach who took us to the 2002 Eastern Conference finals and embarked on a series of individually semi-defensible moves that had no correlation to one another. Within four years, we had the league's youngest roster, fans were openly rooting for losses (for lottery purposes) and the team was shamefully tanking down the stretch. Looking back, it was pathetic. We disgraced the game of basketball for a 38.7 percent chance at Oden or Durant. Not even 2-in-5 odds.

point #1- remember this paragraph. bill admits that the Celtics have made a very large number of terrible personnel decisions in the last 10 to 15 years. this will be important later on.

point #2- if it pleases the court, i would like to enter into evidence exhibit A: this article by mr. simmons, written and published on espn.com, 1st of february, 2007.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/070202_magazine

if you want to read the whole thing, you can. but it is best summed put by this two item list, immediately following the second paragraph in which simmons has explained that the sports world has been less than fun for him in the recent past thanks to the patriots losing to the colts in the afc title game and the red sox spending tons of money and thus becoming very yankee-ish:

Fortunately, I have two quests to keep me going:

1. Watching every televised game that features Greg Oden or Kevin Durant.

2. Rooting for the Boston Celtics to lose.

mr. simmons goes on to explain his thesis- that its ok to root for your team to lose as long as doing so will get them to a better place. obviously, in this case, he means by earning them a better chance at scoring one of the top two picks in the lottery. in the current pity party article (not the old one i just linked) simmons calls this behavior “disgracelful” and “pathetic”, but implicates celtics fans in general rather than himself. i’m going to go out on a limb and say that he is the number one most popular celtics fan/sports journalist on the planet. he called for this and thus it happened, i assume, to a pretty large scale. whether or not it was his idea in the first place is irrelevant. if hes going to bring up this subject (now, in hindsight) and tear down the team’s fanbase as a whole, he should apologize for writing an article which was published on a major sports website that made the concept sound like a good idea.

Things had fallen so far that those odds assumed a level of hope that exceeded the actual odds. Maybe because of the recent success of the Red Sox and Patriots, that perpetual optimism bled over. We had Pierce, we had Jefferson, we had a 38.7 percent chance at a franchise player. We were still alive, dammit! The Celtics were still alive!

whereas now, with joakim noah, al horford, or yes, even maybe yi jianlian, they are completely and totally dead.

Well, until 8:53 p.m. rolled around last night.

You can't even fathom the pain. Everyone believes Celtics fans get a free pass with this stuff because we won 16 titles in 30 years. Actually, it's the opposite. Long-suffering fans of perennial losers don't know what they're missing. After all, how would they know? You can't miss steak if you've never eaten steak, right? But if you're fortunate enough to follow a perennially successful franchise, then that same franchise starts decomposing right in front of you ... what then?

hey bill- remember that one time you wrote an entire fucking BOOK (to go along with a myriad of online columns) about the 2004 boston red sox and their world series victory? remember what that book was called? “now i can die in peace.” but bill, the sox hadn’t won a world series in almost 90 years! why would you THEN, after that championship, be able to die in peace? that would indicate that you were previously tortured by the sox and their futility. but you had never “had steak”! how could you miss it? why would memories of aaron boone or bill buckner or bucky dent haunt you? its not like you, as a fan, knew what winning a championship was like or something. where does this comment rank on bill simmons is a huge hypocrite scale? i say 9.2. actually, scratch that, i say 100 billion.

The Celtics used to mean something; now they don't. Anyone who remembers the good old days -- when the Garden was rocking, when we were always in the hunt, when you honestly believed that we'd win every close game because someone was looking out for us, when everyone else feared us -- can't come to grips with what's happened. We're like one of those child actors who peaked at 15, made a ton of money, had everyone kissing their ass for a few years and then everything went to crap.

if all that stuff inbetween the two sets of hypens is what a franchise needs to “mean something”, then i’m afraid that about 90% of pro teams out there are totally meaningless. by bill’s definition, it sucks to be a fan of… well, just about any team.

Well, you know what happens to famous child actors who become irrelevant? They go crazy. They go off the deep end. They chain-smoke, they do drugs, they get arrested, they look like hell, they disgrace themselves on "The Surreal Life" or "Celebrity Fit Club" because they're so desperate to be famous again.

say that to vanilla ice’s face. i dare you. he will destroy the area surrounding you and possibly you as well.

And these things happen because they're still trapped in the past and waking up every day wondering, "What the hell happened? I used to be living the high life!" Basically, every Celtics fan older than the age of 25 has turned into Macaulay Culkin. And the ones younger than 25 can't even remember what they're supposed to be missing.

when the denver broncos eventually start sucking for a period of time in the next 10 years, i hope i don’t start acting like macaulay culkin. i hope that i can take it in stride, saying to myself, “well, this was bound to happen, they were well above average for about 15 years there… sports are cyclical, i’m sure they’ll be back on top sometime soon.” but this is probably only empty hope. odds are i'll end up like simmons and shit my pants in frustration when they win a meaningless week 17 game in 2016, accidentally moving up from #2 to #5 in that year’s draft and missing out on the greg oden of quarterbacks. or is that the yi jianlian of quarterbacks?

So when the Celtics got crushed last night, you could feel it everywhere you went. You could feel the pain. You could. Even a normally gregarious sports bar called The Four's felt like it had been rented out for an Irish wake. When JackO, the Bug and I grabbed three seats at the bar, I was still in complete shock. I looked like Brady Quinn after Ted Ginn Jr. went No. 9 in the draft, crossed with Tim Duncan after Derek Fisher made the miracle shot in the 2004 playoffs, crossed with Andy Van Slyke after the Francisco Cabrera single, crossed with Mark Cuban during Game 6 of the Warriors-Mavs series.

first semi-clever reference of the article. i like this one, especially because i don’t really care for all those “making the face” guys except for Cuban. still… YOU MOVED DOWN THREE LOUSY SPOTS. at least you’re not a suns fan. they were slated to get the hawks’ pick as part of an old trade, as long as it wasn’t in the top 3. there was a 75% chance of this desirable outcome happening. the pick wouldn’t have been lower than #7 and could have been as high as #4. instead, because the hawks jumped to #3, the suns were left with exactly nothing. granted, they will get atlanta’s first round pick next year no matter what. but the hawks will probably be better and may not even be in the lottery (a long shot, but it could happen). meanwhile, in phoenix, steve nash is a year older and amare stoudemire and shawn marion can’t get along. i think the suns got screwed much worse. in fact, i know the suns got screwed much worse- just look at the damn odds. from having a 38% chance of getting #1 or #2, and then dropping to #5, vs. having a 75% chance of getting #4, 5, 6, or 7 to having nothing. quit whining bill.

I couldn't get past what happened -- how everything was going so well, how all the envelopes were coming up in order, and then that improbable moment when the Bucks popped up at No. 6, followed by the traumatic realization that …

A. Three teams had jumped Milwaukee into the top three.
B. The Celtics were in the next envelope.
C. Four straight months of rooting against my own team had gone for naught.

it makes me even happier to realize that he was thinking this as i was celebrating the fact that i would be writing this post. to be fair, even if boston had won the lottery ended up #1, i would still have planned to rip on him when he wrote a column about how the celtics were saved and everything was lining up for a decade of dominance. but this is more fun.

I couldn't get past seeing that Bucks logo, or the unexpected crotch punch of Brandon Roy (who could have been ours last summer if we swapped picks with Minnesota over making the moronic Telfair trade) cheerfully accepting the No. 1 pick on Portland's behalf, or even my 59-year-old father slumped against the side of the sofa like a gunshot victim. It was too cruel, all of it, the whole thing. I wasn't handling it well. For the past hour, my friends were trying to cheer me up by kidding that we could still get the Chinese guy at No. 5. It became a running joke of sorts. I even cracked a half-smile at one point.

i’m sure it looked as smarmy as your columns are. also, see my previous comments on what some actual bad things to happen to a franchise are: team moving, player dies, losing championship game in a painful manner, etc.

Which brings us to the aforementioned Alan Alda moment …

Patrick the Bartender (one of the greats) stopped by for some Ping-Pong ball commiseration and offered the obligatory "Christ, what do we do now?" question. It lingered in the air like a stale fart. None of us knew what to say. Finally, the Bug lightened the mood by responding, "Whaddya think about rolling the dice with the Chinese guy at 5?"

oh j-bug. you know how to push all the right buttons. i wish bill would write about your crazy misadventures more.

And Patrick the Bartender responded in all seriousness, "If he's still there."

If he's still there.

In the span of two hours, I'd gone from dreaming about Greg Oden or Kevin Durant saving the Celtics to Patrick the Bartender earnestly wondering whether the Chinese Brad Lohaus would be available at No. 5. If he's still there. Eventually, those four words will be funny. Just not right now. Comedy equals tragedy plus time.

ive already addressed this like three times. i hope yi is available at #5, the celtics pass on him, and then yi goes off for a triple double against them every time they cross paths throughout his career.

The thing that really kills me? I thought we were going to win. I really did. I was feeling it.

Yesterday in downtown Boston, the sun was shining and the sky seemed especially blue. Dad and I walked through the park in Boston Common on our way to lunch and I remember saying, "What a nice day, something good is going to happen." It felt like having a baby all over again -- I just wanted to get it over with, and whatever happened, I knew my life would never be the same. This was different than a Super Bowl or a deciding World Series game because the next 15 years of the franchise hung in the balance; as strange as this sounds, the stakes were higher. So I found myself looking for signs all day. For instance, when our bill for lunch came, I left a $17 tip, then realized after the fact, "Hey, 17, that's a good sign, we're going for our 17th title!" I'm not saying this was rational. Just trying to explain my mood at the time.

1. no one cares about the fact that you have a kid. you’ve copulated with a woman, who conceived and bore your child. welcome to nature.

2. way to flaunt the fact that you leave large tips. assuming bill tips 15-20%, and he was eating with just his dad, that’s about a $50 per person lunch. “oooooh! i’m bill simmons and i’m rich!” man, i’m getting pretty childish here. but still… give us a different example from this superstitious day, you pompous ass.

We headed back to Dad's house, watched the lottery show and decided on a pay-per-view movie to kill two hours (and some nervous energy). We were leaning toward "The Good Shepherd" until we realized it was 168 minutes. Dad didn't want to see "Bobby." Both of us agreed that "Children of Men" was too depressing.

children of men was awesome, and somewhat uplifting at the very end. sort of. it’s a great movie, just wanted to throw that out there.

No, we needed an action movie. We needed to see things blow up. I pushed hard for "Déjà Vu" because you can always count on Denzel, even in the worst possible movie. He's like KG that way. Dad agreed. We bought the movie.

It took us a solid hour to realize our mistake: Not that we rented a bad movie, but that we rented a movie named "Déjà Vu" 10 years after the Duncan lottery. I don't know if this was the dumbest suggestion I've ever made in my life, but it's definitely in the top five. I inadvertently filmed my own Bad Idea Jeans commercial. After playing the karma card perfectly all week, I self-destructed at the worst possible time.

i love being superstitious about sports, but this is taking it waaayyyyyy too far. sports gal, you’re a lucky lady. also, sweet bad idea jeans reference.

A few hours later, we were renting "Déjà Vu" all over again ... only this time, it was for the next 10-12 years. See, out of any professional league, luck matters most in the NBA. You need to get lucky with Ping-Pong balls. You need to get lucky with draft picks. You need to get lucky with your GM and your coach. You need to make lucky trades that work out.

this is staggeringly dumb. minus the ping pong balls part, you just described every single goddamn professional sport on the planet. this is like saying “my hometown is the best town in the world. we have buildings, and people live there, and its on earth.” true, the ping pong balls do make for an extra “luck factor” sometimes. but they don’t even affect more than half the teams in the league, including every team on the verge of winning a championship.

furthermore, i would argue that luck matters the LEAST in the nba compared to other sports because each team has so few players! all you need to go from terrible to great is three, two, or on rare occasions even ONE guy! that’s it! one or two lucky free agents… one or two lucky trades… one or two lucky draft picks, or some combination of those three things, and suddenly you’re a contender. meanwhile, putting together a championship football or baseball team requires tons of lucky moves. especially in football, with the salary cap the way it is and teams at 50+ players, once you get good you have to get extraordinarily lucky just to keep your core guys together for more than two or three years. nevermind managing their surrounding cast through the draft, free agency, and trades, or the coaching staff. simmons, you’re just not making any sense. why don’t you go write for an entertainment site about your favorite 80s movies and tv shows and stop bothering sports fans?

The Spurs were lucky when they landed Duncan. The Bulls were lucky when the Blazers took Bowie. The Lakers were lucky that Shaq wanted out of Orlando and Kareem wanted out of Milwaukee. Miami was lucky that Wade fell to 5. Washington was lucky that they saved cap space for a summer in which Arenas became a free agent. Phoenix was lucky that Dallas cut ties with Nash. Luck, luck, luck. You can make your own luck to some degree, but still, you need to be lucky.

the cardinals were lucky when they drafted pujols. the colts were lucky when they hired tony dungy. the carolina hurricanes were lucky none of their players got accidentally run over by the zamboni guy during the stanley cup finals. and so on and so on. this is out-effing-rageous.

Ever since the summer of '86, for nearly 21 years and counting, the Celtics have been wildly, comically, irrationally unlucky.

remember that part i told you to remember way back up there where simmons was listing all the really dumb, non luck-based, things the Celtics have done since bird retired? try copying and pasting them together in the same document with this sentence and then reading the two parts back to back a bunch of times. your head might explode.

That's an exceptionally long time. Maybe we didn't fully realize the ramifications of losing a potential franchise player in '97, but we certainly realize them now. We're back to Square 1. We're sentenced to another decade of quick-fix plans, risky trades and dumb free agent signings. We're looking at another decade of excuses, spin control and hyperbole. We're headed for another decade in which the Sox and Pats are Michael, and Sonny and the Celtics are Fredo. It's basketball déjà vu.

i need to borrow his crystal ball so i can find out whether or not its worth it to keep following the bad teams i like. that would make my life a lot less stressful.

Maybe they can snap out of it. Maybe. Still, I can't shake the image of my 59-year-old father slumped against the sofa as Brandon Roy was happily shaking hands with everyone in Secaucus. The last time we won an NBA title, my dad was one year older than I am right now.

the last time my favorite NBA team won a title was never. my dad was zero then. same (or substitute “a really long time ago” for never) goes for the fans of many teams in every sport. that’s how it works. you and your dad have absolutely nothing to complain about. good thing you are so full of yourself and shortsighted that you cant see that, and subsequently write articles i can tear apart.

Time flies when you're a sports fan. Last night, Dad looked as wistful as Karl Malone during the 2004 Finals when the Lakers were falling apart. See, you only have so many chances in life. The older you get, the more you appreciate those chances.

and now your team has a chance to make a top 5 pick in a fantastic NBA draft. should they focus on making that pick as wisely as possible, or cry over spilled milk and forfeit it because it "doesn’t matter" anyways? hopefully the celtics front office operates differently than bill does, or they actually ARE in trouble.

"Hey, at least we have the Sox and Pats," I told him.

good, bill, you're absolutely right. tell this sob story to sports fans in buffalo or cleveland. see how sorry they feel for you about your terrible misfortune.

Dad nodded glumly. We waited for him to say something profound. We waited for him to put the night in perspective. After all, that's what older people do. They inject wisdom at the perfect time, right?

"That sucked," he finally mumbled. "That really, really sucked."

And then some.

what a sweet ending for such a sweet column. my day is officially made. thank you bill, thank you espn, but most of all, thank you david stern for rigging the draft to keep the celtics out of the top two. at least, that’s what i assume happened. i’ve bled myself dry here- i really don’t have anything left. ill try to end on a high note- once the draft is over, simmons probably wont be writing about the celtics for at least 5 months! hooray! until then, keep three things in mind-

1. if your team wins a ton of championships and then becomes bad for a while, you have more right to complain than someone who is a fan of a team that never wins championships.
2. bill simmons is a gigantic hypocrite (see #1)
3. we already know with 100% certainty that yi jianlian is terrible at basketball and is going to flop in the NBA, so don’t draft him.

the end.