Big Splashes

Chauncey Billups’ benefit golf outing the other day drew his uber agent, Andy Miller, to town. And since Miller and Joe Dumars had recently shaken hands on new contracts for three Miller clients – Antonio McDyess and second-round pick Sammy Mejia in addition to Billups – Miller made Joe D privy to the real scoop involving another Miller client making news.

So Dumars knew more than 24 hours before the deal was done that resurrected talk of Kevin Garnett to Boston was well past the rumor stage this time as he and Flip Saunders pondered what it might mean. As Dumars ran the roster consequences of the trade for both Minnesota and Boston through his mind, you could see the wheels spinning. Would Boston, suddenly short on bodies, make a play for somebody on his team? Minnesota, with a sudden glut of players, would have to dump some – would any be of value to the Pistons?

Saunders, no doubt, was looking at it from another angle: How do we defend a team that can field three legitimate 25-point scorers in Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce?

I mentioned to them that with Garnett’s move from the West to the East, that made a virtual All-Star team – Garnett, Allen, Rashard Lewis, Zach Randolph and Jason Richardson – that switched conferences this off-season without one player of equal magnitude heading back. (The real toll of adding those five premier scorers boils down to broken-down veteran Steve Francis, promising young Al Jefferson and Gerald Green, and No. 1 picks Brandan Wright and Jeff Green, plus a few future draft picks.)

While that makes for a far more intriguing season ahead on this side of the Mississippi, I’m not really sure it does much to affect the NBA’s balance of power – either the imbalance between East and West or the pecking order in the East.

I qualified it as a “virtual” All-Star team because, as you probably noticed, there’s not a point guard in the bunch – which, come to think of it, also describes the rebuilt Celtics’ starting lineup.

While adding those players has created a welcome stir in Boston, New York, Orlando and Charlotte, do they really vault those teams into contention in the East? Maybe for Boston. New York has firepower but a lot of the same old problems. Orlando and Charlotte? They’ll win more games, but they need at least another off-season’s maneuverings in order to compete at the top of the conference.

In the grand scheme of things, I still see the East as a chase between the Pistons, Chicago and Cleveland with Miami poised to join them pending Shaquille O’Neal’s durability issues. The Knicks and Celtics have now joined Toronto, Washington and New Jersey in the East’s middle class with Orlando and Charlotte doing enough to perhaps separate themselves from everybody else.

Let’s take a quick look at the Eastern teams that made major off-season moves and how it might affect them:

Boston – No question, the Celtics are a much, much more potent team now than the one that limped to the finish line last April hoping to win the draft lottery and rebuild around Greg Oden, already being billed as the Bill Russell for the next generation.

The Celtics improbably slipped to fifth in the lottery and Danny Ainge didn’t see much of a future in adding another young player to a cast already teeming with too much youth. So he rolled the dice in a big way on draft night, building a package around that No. 5 pick and Wally Szczerbiak’s $12 million contract and took back Seattle’s Ray Allen, arguably the league’s best shooter, to pair with Paul Pierce.

The Garnett trade makes Boston perhaps the league’s most intriguing team heading into next season – a team with three legitimate No. 1 scoring options but a gaping chasm in talent from the big three to everybody else. It will take some master strokes by Ainge from now until training camp starts to fill out his roster. His best bet is hoping the few serviceable veterans still on the open market are also intrigued by Boston’s circumstances and accept below-market contracts – read: veteran’s minimum – for the chance to compete for a championship.

Lots of luck with that, Danny. It’s the same thing Pat Riley’s been hoping for in Miami the last few summers – and there’s no South Beach in Boston.

New York – It’s still tempting to write this off as a lab experiment gone bad, but the thought of pairing Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph does suggest certain possibilities for the Knicks. In a league with not more than two handfuls of legitimate low-post scoring forces, Curry and Randolph give the Knicks two of the very best in the business.

The two very loud questions will be how they co-exist offensively and how New York survives with them in tandem defensively.

Randolph has more offensive versatility than Curry. He’s capable of stepping out to the free-throw line or the elbows and knocking down jumpers at a pretty fair clip. But do that and you’re taking away what he does best, which is use his bulk and leverage cleverly to exploit his uncanny ability to make shots around the basket.

Both Randolph and Curry have some conditioning issues, so the Knicks might be better served to bring Randolph off the bench – where he’d be devastating against second units – and limit the minutes of both to around 30 a game. It would allow Isiah Thomas to get David Lee on the floor to start games, which would balance the lineup a little and improve the Knicks’ defense.

Orlando – While Boston spent big on 30-plus veterans to create a yawning three-year window to go after championships, Orlando has now tied its future to young Dwight Howard and 27-year-old Rashard Lewis. That should give the Magic several years to chase titles, but they’ll soon be paying just those two players close to $40 million a year. That’s going to make real roster improvement difficult to come by.

Signing Lewis meant the Magic had to relinquish rights to Darko Milicic. In the short-term, that’s a no-brainer. But adding Lewis at the expense of Milicic and free-agent defector Grant Hill might not translate into a significantly better record, especially when the Magic have critical weaknesses in a backcourt built around Jameer Nelson, Keyon Dooling, Carlos Arroyo, Keith Bogans and J.J. Redick. That’s not exactly Billups and Hamilton, is it?

Charlotte – Mine appears a minority position, but I kind of like the Jason Richardson deal the Bobcats swung on draft night, trading the No. 8 pick to Golden State and getting back the explosive Richardson, still only 26.

With a solid young point guard in Raymond Felton, the maturing Gerald Wallace re-signed, building block big man Emeka Okafor entering his fourth year and a few useful parts to fill in – shooter Matt Carroll, banger Sean May, rookie Jared Dudley and maybe Adam Morrison – the Bobcats could emerge as one of the East’s surprises.

Yeah, Richardson has a big contract – four more years and $50 million coming – but he’s an unadulterated scorer, and that’s what this earnest young team needs more than anything.