How's the trade looking now?

If there were mulligans in basketball, the Celtics would have taken one after their disaster of a performance against the Timberwolves. In a game that essentially boiled down to Celtics starters versus their third string, the third string beat us like a rented mule.

However, I implore Celtics Nation to remain calm for the following reasons:

1) Ricky had an off-night and Wally played well. Advantage- Wally. This was the biggest part of the trade, and it appears that Wally will be an improvement over Davis. While Wally does not rebound or pass the ball as well as Ricky, he is far more consistant of a player, and he shoots much better. Wally is also a solid defensive player that may not get steals, but does not have the mental lapses that Ricky tends to have. In short, while Ricky's best performance is probably better than Wally's, Wally's average performance is siginifactly better than Ricky's.

2) Mark Blount could be expected to play well. When he has incentive, he is an excellent player. Unfortunately, he is a crybaby, a wuss, and he sucks at life, so that will not last long. What can the T-Wolves do to please that retarded giraffe that the Celtics didn't give him? He was given EVERYTHING by the Celtics (big contract, touches, and playing time) but he still behaved like a spoiled little girl. The best part was the postgame quote when he thought that he was the focus of the trade. Um... yeah... if by "focus of the trade" he means "the guy you'd give up for couple boxes of frozen hot dogs". How long before Blount starts to pout and destroy this team? I'll give him a week.

3) Big Al is turning into an excellent rebounder and is finally starting to show the excitement he had last season.

Now, I implore Celtics Nation to flip out for the following reasons:

1) Marcus Banks was incredible for the T-Wolves. Everything that Doc hated him for (shot selection, jump shot range, court sense, passing ability) turned out to be completely misunderestimated. Banks was stroking threes, passing the ball on the money for layups, and dominating the floor.

The Celtics drafted Banks with hopes of developing him. Here was their strategy:

a) Don't play him.
b) In the five minutes you give him a night, criticize the hell out of him publicly whenever he does something wrong.
c) Constantly make an example out of him.
d) Threaten to trade him ALL THE TIME, even trade him once before (it didn't go through, or course).
e) Make it clear that you were really, really disappointed that the aforementioned trade did not go through.
f) Don't pick up the option on his contract.

The Celtics never had any faith in Marcus Banks. Is there any surprise that Banks didn't have the learning curve we would have liked? Should he have played over Delonte? No... but could Delonte have spent some time at the '2' with Banks running the show? Did we ever TRY that?

Should he have played over ORIEN "6 TURNOVERS" GREEN AND DAN "SECURITY DETAIL" DICKAU?!? Mind-boggling. Did Dickau give you the intangibles that Marcus didn't? Is he a "team player" because he agreed to take one for the team and hang out with Brian Scalabrine on road trips?

If Marcus was bad for the locker room, why didn't we play him more and at least up his trade value? We basically traded Marcus, JReed, and two second-rounders for a first-round pick. Great. If this team is in need of something, it's more undeveloped young players. We're not getting any younger.

The silver lining is that first-round pick is good for trades in the future. Still, Danny and Doc blew it with Marcus, and hopefully it doesn't burn us like Chauncey, Joe Johnson, Rick Fox...

2) Perkins looked like a horse's ass out there. I don't need to go into too much detail here, because everyone knows I love Perk, but you'd think he'd be up for taking on an ex-teammate that used to talk smack behind his back all the time. Ouch. That couldn't have been good for the confidence. He as many fouls as he had points and rebounds combined.

3) Our bench is awful. We have a good sixth man in Jefferson, an occassional strong performance from a still-rehabbing Tony Allen, and then we go straight to a fat redhead that would get picked last for a pickup game at Harvard Elementary School if he showed up this afternoon in his Celtics jersey. It doesn't get any better than that- the only charge we get out of the rest of the bench is when Kandi Man gets tazered at a nightclub.

Overall?

The Celtics were poised to make a playoff run before the trade. It doesn't look that way now. Hopefully, this will make the Celtics better in the long run, but it's clear that the front office is looking forward to next year even though there is half of this season left to play. Hopefully, the Celts have a trick up their sleeve.