Kevin McHale believes Boston Celtics “Big Three” still good enough for another title run – NBA News
After Eastern Conference Finals elimination at the hands of the Miami Heat, the Boston Celtics have an uncertain future with many key decisions to be made in the upcoming months.
Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen will both be free agents in the coming summer and rest assured, there will be teams who will be looking to hire their services. The decision, Celtics need to make is whether they are
going to stick with their core in Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen. And if not, who are the key players around which they should restructure the team.
The Celtics played with a great deal of heart to finish 4th in the Eastern Conference and then to make it all the way to the Conference Finals, despite being injury riddled. Having said
that, the prospect of the core Celtic players coming back together for another season to take one more shot at the NBA championship looks quite bleak.
Garnett and Allen are both 36 while Pierce is 34. At that age, they only have a few years left before they retire and having all of them in the same team makes the Celtics relatively old and slow compared to
the younger teams in the NBA.
Rajon Rondo has emerged as the new leader of the Celtics this season. There is a strong possibility that the Celtics management starts building a new team around him, with Brandon Bass, Avery Bradley and Mickael
Pietrus, who have all had good seasons as role players for the Celtics. On the other hand, another Big Three run can also not be ruled out, as a team that is capable of reaching the conference finals surely cannot be written off.
Former Celtics Hall of Famer and Houston Rockets head coach Kevin McHale believes that the Celtics still have it in them to go for one or two more title runs. Speaking at the Adidas Eurocamp at Treviso, Italy
on Monday, he said:
“They got to the Conference finals, we’ll see what happens. Those guys have got contracts that they’re going to have to get signed; it has yet to be determined what’s going to happen. I would be surprised if
they didn’t try to put the team together for another run for a year or two. If you get to the Conference finals, you’re one of the last four teams. So why would you blow up a team that’s better than 26 other teams in the NBA? I think they’re going to probably
ride this out a little bit.”
The Boston Celtics will face competition from teams such as Miami, Indiana as well as the Chicago Bulls next season. Whatever path they choose to take from here on will depend on whether the team they are compiling
can compete with these franchises.
Tags: