The Era of the
Celtics or: Terrifying Basketball Robots Take Over
In the mid-50s, a man named Red Auerbach came to power. Red was a simple man. He had grown up the son of a dry cleaner and
so had undergone the usual bullying that accompanies one’s father being a piece
of laundry equipment. However, that very
connection to the mechanical shaped Red into the basketball mastermind he would
one day become. After adopting the last
name “Auerbach” after sneezing loudly while in line at the DMV, Red joined the
Navy and began coaching the academy’s basketball team. Red loved the military efficiency that his
team played with but couldn’t help but noticing how all those intricacies of being
human got in the way. Players would miss
games for family emergencies or because they had been run over by a train. Sometimes the point guard would relay the
wrong play or make a poor decision. To
err is to be human, and Red Auerbach would have none of that.
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| Pictured: Red Auerbach |
For you see, Red wanted one thing: to win. He had the heart of a champion. And with that heart, which he had torn from
the chest of Joe Louis in 1938 and kept on display on his mantle, Red knew he
had what it took to dominate the NBA.
For you see, the NBA had the same problems that Red was having with his
Navy teams: everyone playing the game was entirely too human. Red drew on his childhood roots to fix this
problem. In 1946, when Red was hired to
coach the Washington Capitols of the BAA, he began work on his robot army.
Having never built sentient robots before, Red’s first few
attempts were absolute failures. Several
members of the 1947-48 Capitols begun to develop feelings and empathy, and so
had to be put down like the disgusting robot dogs that they were. Another robot was retired when it tore the
head off an opposing player to see how humans worked.
Taking into account his many failures, Red set about
creating a team that would actually function as he wanted. He was working outside the established rules
of robotics, in ever-present danger of creating Skynet. He knew the dangers inherent in this work,
but was too passionate about basketball to give up. If anyone could do this, it was Red. With the help of his half-washing machine
upbringing, he had to be able to come up with a viable solution.
Thankfully, luck struck at just the right time. The University of San Francisco had been
building the perfect robotic killing machine.
USF had planned to use the robot, codenamed “Bi11 Russ311,” to defeat
the communist menace on the West Coast.
This plan failed, however, when one of the program’s chief developers
secreted Bi11 away in the heat of the night.
The dangerous journey Bi11 went through as he made his way across the
country is truly a tale for the ages and has been best told by the 1967 film
“In the Heat of the Night,” starring Sidney Portier as Bi11 Russ311.
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| Pictured: Bi11 |
Anyway, Red used his guile and feminine mystique to fool the
NBA into letting Bi11 enter the NBA Draft.
Once there, Red manipulated behind the scenes. The St. Louis Hawks ended up drafting Bi11
per Red’s recommendation and were faced with the unholy fury that comes forth
whenever USF is scorned. Too busy
fighting back waves upon waves of militant robot underlings, the Hawks traded
Bi11 to Red’s Boston Celtics almost immediately upon drafting him. Unfortunately for the city of St. Louis, USF
didn’t hear about this transaction until it was too late. The city of St. Louis was completely devoured
by robots and has sat empty ever since, with nary a citizen living within its
borders.
Red, on the other hand, was just entering his golden
age. With Bi11 safely out of USF’s
clutches, Red finally had the groundwork laid for his greatest success. He changed Bi11’s name to “Bill Russell,”
which everyone agreed was a bit on the nose, and started to reverse engineer
some of Russell’s technology for use in basketball-specialized robots. The wrist laser cannons and heat-ray eyes
were removed from Red’s new line of robots.
So too were the steam-powered fists and the RoboCop visor. All of these features were wonderful for
killing commies but of less use on the basketball court[1].
Russell eventually learned just what Red’s plan was. For you see, Red had tried to hide this all
from his new robot companion, less Russell become enraged at being used. Luckily for Red, Russell loved the idea and
agreed to it wholeheartedly, with but one caveat: Russell would be allowed to spend his nights
murdering communists wherever he could find them, to satiate the bloodlust
forever programmed within him. This was
a small sacrifice for Red to make, as his family had fled Belarus before his
birth to escape the communists and also because Belarus is awful.
His bloodlust sated, Russell was able to focus on
basketball. He averaged over 20 RPG 10
times in his career, with his lowest RPG total for any season being an
embarrassing 18.6 in 1967-68. He was
also an offensive powerhouse in the same way that Rasheed Wallace was a
measured individual: Russell shot 44% from the field in his career, which isn’t
as bad as it looks thanks to the era in which he played but is still as bad as
it looks because look how bad it is. He
twice averaged over 17 PPG, with a career average of 15 a game. Cuttino Mobley also accomplished this. Regardless, Russell was a defensive force and
allowed Red to expand upon his initial robotics theories and create a team of
basketball automototomotonotons.
The first of Red’s working robots would be his least
predictable. Many of the flaws removed
from later models remained ingrained within this one, though it functioned well
enough. Red worried at times that Bob
Cousy, as the first model was named, was too close to human, but could not deny
its efficiency on the basketball court.
Cousy was often victim to his mechanical neurons firing wrong or his
logic centers overloading, leading him to throw passes no one had ever
attempted before. The human players of
the time that tried to copy him inevitably failed, with few surviving their
attempts. Simply put, he was a miracle
of basketball ingenuity. Red himself
would later admit that he should not have refined his robot-making methods any
further after that and that he had cursed himself by reaching the pinnacle of
robotics so soon in his process.
Even with a strong framework for robot success in place, Red
did not rest. There is always room for
improvement and just two robots would not be able to run rampant through the
NBA. After all, many of Cousy’s passes were
flying into the stands or shattering his teammate’s ribs right now, as no human
could possibly react in time to the mechanical ingenuity. Cousy’s shooting ability hadn’t sorted itself
out well either. He never once shot over
40% from the field in his career. Most
of the time, Cousy would just try and pass the ball into the basket, which
isn’t very good shooting form for you dummies out there. Russell wasn’t exactly a scoring machine, as
his original programming too often led him to staying exclusively on the
defensive side of the court, sniffing out any communists who may have been
lying in wait in the arena.
In short, Red needed someone to score the ball, lest he rely
on Russell’s lacking post game. Red’s
next model took care of this to some extent, though truly it wouldn’t be until
Red added his fourth robot that the scoring really took off.
Bill Sharman and Tom Heinsohn were those robots. Sorry to ruin the suspense and all that.
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| Pictured: Whomever I just mentioned, I don't care. |
Anyway, Sharman’s shooting abilities made me stand out in an
era of big men. As a shooting guard, his
accomplishments (18 PPG, .426 FG% career) would have been astounding for any
human of his time. Of course, as a
robot, it wasn’t really all that impressive.
It was cool, sure, but Red always demanded more from his robots. Being able to devote 24 hours a day to
basketball and basketball alone really helped hone the craft for these robots,
giving Sharman the advantage he needed.
With Cousy cutting into the lane and throwing mindboggling passes back
out to him, Sharman was able to feast on open looks for years and years.
Heinsohn’s abilities were almost as impressive. Nicknamed “Ack-Ack” after the distinctive
noise he would make as his robot mouth was unable to form human language
sounds, Heinsohn rounded out Red’s robot army with style and panache. The rare rebound Russell was unable to corral
would go straight to Heinsohn, which was part of the reason Boston averaged 85
rebounds a game throughout the 1950s.
Some other coaches complained to the league regularly, saying that
Boston would toss extra balls down from the rafters during opponent’s possessions
in order to pad their robots’ stats.
This was absolutely true, of course.
Almost every NBA team creatively deceived the official scorers during
that era, making Boston’s practices not all that out of place. The Syracuse Nationals regularly blindfolded
scorers and insisted they keep stats based only on the action coach Al Cervi
described to them.
All these robots made things a bit awkward with Red. Russell’s violence tended to rub off on his
mechanical brethren, which was a big reason there were no communist
sympathizers in Boston until the late 70s.
This worried Red, however: once every communist had been dealt with,
there was a chance that the robots’ bloodlust would turn to regular, worthwhile
humans. Red needed to add a human
element to the team to ensure that the robots would empathize with their
creators just enough as to not want to kill them all.
Thankfully, Red had kept in contact with the scientist who
had smuggled Russell away from the USF lab where he had been built. That scientist had managed to stay undetected
for two years after sneaking Russell away, but the cat finally got out of the
bag, as cats are wont to do. KC Jones
was on the run and needed help and Red was all too happy to provide it. After all, KC had given Red the jumpstart he
needed to build a robot super team; the least he could do was provide a safe
haven for the beleaguered scientist.
Even better, KC was pretty adequate at basketball. He would be able to spell Cousy for the few
minutes a game that Cousy needed to be repaired or rewired. The other robots, who looked to Russell as
their leader, would take into account KC’s human perspective and be reminded
that they need not exterminate the entire human race. Really, it was a win-win situation.
With this core in place, Red ran rampant over the NBA. 11 titles in 13 years, including 10 straight
trips to the Finals, proved that Red’s robot vision was exactly the way to
succeed in the NBA, at least at the time.
The Celtics were able to compliment their robot core as they went,
adding mere humans like Sam Jones, Dave Cowens, and Cornbread Maxwell[2]
to ensure their success continued. Those
Celtics teams remain legendary in basketball circles for their incredible run,
which has never been matched. Almost
every player to have played for the Celtics from 1955 to 1975 has been inducted
into the Hall of Fame because sometimes people don’t bother to do any research
at all before they vote.
Eventually, the Celtics dynasty fell, allowing the rest of
the NBA a chance to, you know, enjoy themselves and get a little bit of
positive recognition here and there. Red
had laid the groundwork for what has become one of the most storied franchises
in NBA history. In fact, the Celtics
have become such a well-known cultural millstone that nobody is even bothered
by the fact that the team name is pronounced incorrectly. Truly, that is the sign of success.
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