Bird's rookie year record with the Celtics is misleading, he had tremendously improved team support from the previous year. I'll repost this:
"There is no doubt rookie Bird had a huge impact and was the big difference for that team’s turnaround. He was the only new player in the starting lineup, but there’s more to the story and he did have help.
That year the team had gotten a new coach after changing coaches four times in the past two years. They had a bad owner who was destroying the team and Red Auerbach was so angry with his bad moves he threatened to leave until the owner sold the team to a new owner Bird’s rookie year. (One bad move was trading Bob McAdoo after 20 games the year before.)
This gave Red more control over decisions and he quickly restructured the team better. Bench players aging Jojo White, Rowe were gone and he added ML Carr for leadership/intangibles and Henderson on the bench. Cedric Maxwell was also started hitting his stride as a third year player.
He did make Cowens and Tiny better, but they were still all-star talents that year and future HOFers and Maxwell was great all year and in the playoffs (compare Bird’s advanced stats RS and playoffs with Cedric ‘80), that’s talent.
Tiny was #2-4 in the league in assists those years, second team all nba, Cowens made the 2nd all-defensive team in 80’(I don’t put much stock in accolades at all, but they can provide broad strokes of their play contribution)
For their careers Tiny was a 6x All star, a scoring champion (top 3 four times), top 10 in assists 7 years (and lead it once), and HOFer. Cowens was a former league MVP, a top rated defender, 8x All Star, ROY, had already won 2 championships and HOFer. They were both 31 Bird’s rookie year.
Grounded for two seasons, the Celtics are perched high atop the NBA standings. The big difference: a rare Bird of a rookie..In that one nightmare season the Celtics went through two coaches ( Satch Sanders and Dave Cowens), tried 21 different starting lineups and shuttled 18 different players in and out of town.
..The depth of Boston's decline cannot be overemphasized. It was as if by blowing first-round draft choices year after year on the fabled Clarence Glover, Steve Downing, Glenn McDonald, Tom Boswell and Norm Cook, someone in the Celtics' front office was trying to make up to the rest of the league for all the years of Boston's dominance. Even trades that had seemed promising—deals for name players like Sidney Wicks, Curtis Rowe, Billy Knight, Marvin Barnes and Bob McAdoo—had caused only problems. "My first season here we had seven guys who were All-Stars," says third-year Forward Cedric Maxwell, himself a budding star with a league-leading .667 field-goal shooting percentage. "We had more talent then than we do now—superstars at every position—but a lot of them were misfits. Just because you put five guys together on the floor doesn't mean they're going to play well together."
The Celtics certainly proved that. The height of their front-office folly came last winter when John Y. Brown, then the club's owner—he has since got himself elected governor of Kentucky on the skirttails of his bride, Phyllis George—swapped three first-round draft choices to New York for McAdoo. Auerbach was displeased but philosophical. "What are you gonna do?" he says now. "Criticize the owner? Besides, people wouldn't have believed me if I told them how dumb this guy was. He'll probably try to trade the Kentucky Derby for the Indianapolis 500."
Inept as they seemed through these dreadful times, the Celtics did manage to do one thing right. In the 1978 draft Auerbach selected Larry Bird…There are many ways to gauge Bird's importance to the Celtics, but probably the simplest and most telling is to point out that he is the only new face in the starting lineup that finished the season for Boston last season, replacing McAdoo.
..Fitch's job was made easier when the Celtics signed free-agent Forward M. L. Carr from Detroit and then unloaded McAdoo as compensation in the bargain. Only two NBA players had more playing time last season than Carr, and he led the league in steals, but it was as much for his disposition—which is resolutely cheerful—as his skills that Boston went after him.
..It's unlikely that there was another player on the Celtics' roster whose confidence needed restoring more desperately than Archibald. He was one of the premier guards in the game when he ruptured an Achilles' tendon in 1977. Last season, his first in Boston, he was coming back from a layoff of a year and a half, and he was both rusty and not-so-tiny.
http://www.si.com/vault/1979/12/03/8242 ... f-a-rookie
So rookie Bird, who had a great impact, also got a team with much greater stability and leadership in a new coach, new owner, Auerbach with greater control again, an improved bench & intangibles, a third year Cedric Maxwell and a healthy Tiny Archibald.
Tiny and Cowens both made the all star game that year. All these factors aided Bird’s team success imo, so he benefited from better help his rookie year too versus what Hakeem succeeded with."
