Sandwiches????
Rasheed Wallace's first regular season with the Boston Celtics was an unmitigated disaster. Sheed's play has been dissected by Celtics fans ad nauseam and the general consensus has been, "couldn't we have gotten Antoine Walker to miss 72% of his threes for access to the post game buffets?" He is signed for two more years and at this rate he might be neglecting to travel with the team by year three.
All season Rasheed ignored the criticism and maintained that he would be a difference maker in the playoffs, when it mattered.
Starting in Game 2 of the Cavaliers series Sheed began contributing. He bullied and battered Dwight Howard in game one of the Eastern Conference finals to the point where Dwight might now despise him more than most Celtics fans do.
So is Rasheed Wallace really a misunderstood and progressive thinking strategist who has created a new blueprint for veteran NBA teams? Was that talk of challenging the Chicago Bulls regular season wins record a red herring to throw other teams off his true strategy? The Celtics clearly cruised through the regular season and saved their max effort for the playoffs. The Celtics were going to win the Atlantic division in 2010 no matter what they did, so saving gas while coasting downhill in March and April might be the key difference maker for a team with lots of mileage on the odometer.
A mad scientist like plot to rethink regular season attitudes would certainly make sense in light of how little urgency the team displayed throughout the many regular season low points. It would also help explain the whispering about locker room rifts particularly between the new and old guards. It is a dangerous strategy, one that failed in Detroit, but the Celtics did look fresher against Miami than they did while going to seven games in round one of the 2008 and 2009 playoffs. Still, redemption can only be earned through championship number 18 because the Celtics organization doesn't hang banners for Eastern Conference or Atlantic Division titles.
Should the Celtics get the 7 more wins it would take to hang banner #18 we may look back one day on the 09-10 regular season as a paradigm shift in the NBA, thought up by a loose cannon with Einstein-like hair. If so, Michael Lewis will have an NBA follow-up to "Moneyball" with "Butterball - How Rasheed Wallace changed the NBA."
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