Rasheed Wallace

[Cannon Shell]

Originally Posted by GPK

a very unfair comparison....Bird was 23 in his rookie year. The Celtics finished that 79-80 season 61-21, which was first in the Atlantic Division. The PREVIOUS season before Bird's rookie season....29-53 and 5th in the Atlantic Division.

Don't bring age into this...Bird a much greater impact on his team his rookie year than Lebron did.

However if you look at the Celts season before you will see that there were several reasons why they improved that had nothing to do with Bird. The 78-79 Celts were coached by Tom Sanders and then Dave Cowens as a player-coach, both poor coaches. The season was upended by 1/2 the roster being traded to Buffalo after 20 games. Tiny Archabald had his worst season as a pro partly because he was coming off missing a year due to a serious foot injury and also because of a fued between him and a fading Jo Jo White. The Celtics hired Bill Fitch for the next season (Birds first), got rid of most of the trouble makers like Marvin Barnes and White, moved Cowens back to the floor, signed Pistol Pete for offense off the bench, inserted Chris Ford in Whites place, utilized the thug ML Carr as a sixth man and added one of the top 5 all time great players. Cornbread was in his prime.

Bird, of course was the biggest reason, but the Celts self imposed chaos of the previous 2 seasons with coaching changes, trades, ownership upheaval made them worse than they really were. Dont forget that there were 4 Hall of Famers on the roster in Birds first year.

The Cavs on the other hand were just plain bad. 17-65 is really bad. That was with Carlos Boozer, Ilguakas, Dejuan Wagner, and Ricky Davis. They added Lebron and Jeff Mcginnis subtracted Davis and improved 18 games with Paul Silas as coach. Adding Jeff McGinnis and improving is a feat in itself.