1989

[chakdaddy]

I always felt that last year was the replay of 1987-88 on its 20th anniversary; that happened to be the first year that I *really* paid attention as a kid and I thought it was one of the most epic postseasons.

Lots of things repeated itself - Celtics/Hawks 7 game battle; Game 7 eastern semi duel (Pierce/LeBron and Bird/Wilkins); tough series with Detroit in the ECF; similar cast of contenders out west with LA, Dallas, and Utah some of the principals (Spurs thrown in for good measure this year.) I feared that the conclusion would be the same as well, LA over Detroit, but this time the refs wound up not allowing the Detroit thugball (a real corner turned when we won 5-on-8 in that game where Pierce got called for a travel instead of getting 3 ft's.) Somehow the rightful conclusion occurred 20 years later.

Now it's 21 years later again - '88-89 was ruined when we got jerked around with Bird's ankle bone spurs, always hearing he would come back.. It's kind of the same thing with Garnett now, especially with the talk of "spur rubbing on tendon."

Except, we are certainly doing better without KG than the '89 team did without LB; shocking, since I would prefer the chances of McHale/Parish/DJ to those of Pierce/Ray/Rondo. (I always point at that season to impress the greatness of Bird - Bird gets hurt, and even with McHale, Parish, DJ, and Reggie Lewis, the Celtics go from championship contender to 8th seed. Meanwhile, Jordan retires, and Pippen is still able to win 55 games and go deep in the playoffs without him...)

What else will repeat from 1989? Detroit makes a surprise of a core player midseason - Agurirre seemed to work out better than Iverson. Luckily we didn't make a short-sighted trade (as much as I liked Ed Pinckney, maybe Ainge learned a lesson from being closely associated with that - why trade a good young player to salvage a season that's already doomed???)

Cleveland / Chicago could be a first round matchup - Cleveland was poised for a big run when Chicago ruined it in the first round with "the shot." Another parallel is Portland rising on the horizon to dethrone LA out west, but that's not due until 1990 / 2010.

Again, maybe history corrects itself - KG, unlike Bird, comes back for the playoffs and things work out; hopefully 1995 is the parallel instead. We already saw Tony Parker pull a Nick Anderson, hopefully that's an omen.

[BRUNiNHO91]

WOW...amazing basketball knowledge man...how you remember all of this is just beyond me...I enjoyed this post and the similarities between these seasons...thanks for sharing this with us..specially with me since I wasn't even born when those things happened...

[Kefa461]

Well I hope it turns out better then the past, as my memory goes...Bird was out early in the season ..maybe the 5th or 6th game I think...had to have foot surgery ( let's hope it's not that) KG has floater and not bone to tendon, Birds was a bone spurs in the ankles like what Ray had and they are a bit different. We backed in as #8 and we were toasted........I do hope this team is tighter then that this season.