This is it. This is our year. I feel good about our ping-pong balls.
I know I may sound like one of those crazed Red Sox fans circa 2003, the ones that muttered “Reverse the Curse” in their sleep for 86 years. Maybe even a little like the guys in Chicago who can’t stop blaming a billy goat for all their troubles. But it feels like tonight will be the night the Celtics finally come out on top in the NBA draft lottery.
My brain filled with optimism watching Boston basketball this season. The way I gushed about Isaiah Thomas or talked about Brad Stevens like he was the second coming of a man named Red was probably unbearable at times. But here I am again, with all this optimism creeping in on the night of the lottery.
Something about our ping-pong balls spinning, in that machine that spits out the answer to some type of mathematical equation that is far too complex for me to understand, just makes me feel good.
There’s no historical evidence for my overflowing optimism. Since 1986, the Celtics have drafted just twice in the top three – Chauncey Billups at No. 3 in 1997 and Len Bias at No. 2 in 1986. Boston actually had the best chance at the top pick in 1997 at 27 percent, but somehow fell to No. 3, took Billups and traded him halfway through the season to Toronto for Kenny Anderson. Bias, 22 at the time, died tragically of a cocaine overdose two days after the draft.
The Celtics, with a .585 winning percentage in 2015-16, would be the best team since Philadelphia in 1986 to have the No. 1 pick. In fact, Boston would be only the second team since the lottery started in 1985 to have a winning record the year before and the No. 1 pick. (The Sixers went 54-28 before winning the top pick in 1986 and the Magic were .500 when they stole their second consecutive No. 1 pick in 1993).
Boston currently has the No. 16 and 23 picks, too. The 2013 trade that sent Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce to Brooklyn gave the Celtics the lottery chance this year and they’ll have one more first-round pick in 2018 and an option to swap first-round picks next year. The No. 16 pick comes from Dallas as a result of last season’s Rajon Rondo trade.
The Celtics have the third-best chance to grab the top pick tonight, behind the Sixers and the Lakers. Over the last 10 years, just two teams with the same odds have seen their little plastic ping-pong balls succeed and only seven teams have done so since 1985. In 11 trips to the lottery, the C’s have moved up just twice, landed in their draft spot six times and fell back three times.
Maybe I’m drinking the Boston Kool Aid because of the season the Celtics just had. But it’s so easy to feel good about this team. It’s okay to get excited about what Danny Ainge and Stevens are putting together down in Boston. It’s alright to hope and dream and wish and pray that the Celtics get the No. 1 pick tonight, that our ping-pong balls are the best ping-pong balls in the league.
The reality is that there are two high-caliber players in Ben Simmons (LSU) and Brandon Ingram (Duke) who will be in the top two spots of that draft board in Brooklyn on June 23. And if one of those players ends up in green and white – even if they are traded before ever playing a game in Boston – they will push this rebuild into overdrive.
The Celtics were good, not great, this year, and Ainge knows it. Everyone in Boston knows a piece or two is missing, but this is the year Ainge has been waiting for as GM. He has stockpiled these draft picks – five in 2015 and eight (yes, that’s right, EIGHT) in 2016 – in preparation for this moment, for this draft, and taking this particular team to the next level.
“This offseason is bigger. My expectations are high this offseason, and yet I also know that it takes good fortune,” Ainge told reporters recently. “We need the ping-pong balls to bounce our way and give us the best opportunity, whether we use that pick or whether we trade that pick.”
I’m not saying the Celtics have this one in the bag. I’m just saying I feel good about our ping-pong balls.
(Michelle Berthiaume can be reached at 369-3338, mberthiaume@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @MonitorMichelle)