PROTECT THE PAINT

Please don’t shout this in a public place.

Especially a nightclub where one or more sportsmen might be showering money on girls they would like to shower with.

But, well, winning the NBA Championship doesn’t take skill. Not merely skill, anyway.
It takes intelligence.

Yes, I know this is not normally a term associated with NBA players. Especially those with an equal predilection for ganja and gunja.

But please look around those Los Angeles Lakers.

You might not like to invite Kobe Bryant to your Thanksgiving Dinner, but you know that this is an intelligent man.

You might rather like to invite Pau Gasol. Not merely because he managed to manage playing with Kobe, but because you suspect he’d talk a little existential philosophy and then play hoops with your own immature offspring in the backyard.

And then there’s Derek Fisher. Equal parts cynical, sanctimonious and fortunate, but always trading intelligently on all three.

Which leads one quite brightly to the Boston Celtics.

"What's the square root of 1,864 , Jabbey. You have no idea, right?" (Credit:picapp.com)

In signing Rasheed Wallace, the Celtics didn’t just acquire some basketball intelligence. Even though they say that in drills, Wallace is as comfortable playing all five positions as most Clippers are uncomfortable playing one.

Rasheed Wallace is simply an intelligent man.

You will scream that he treats refs like an insecure middle manager treats interns. You will groan that he has more whine than Napa.

But there are two types of technical-getters. Those with something of a victim mentality (hello there, Stephen Jackson) and those whose very intelligence is offended by errors.

Their own or the referee’s.

Wallace would not take a mistake out to lunch to ask it to please not plague him again. He will instantly rail against it because it should never have happened. In Wallace World, errors should be permanently prone.

You can imagine that in the privacy of his own personal palace, Wallace’s mind debates what he could have done better as well as what everyone else, including the towel-giver and the announcer, might improve.

By signing for a mid-level exemption rather than a high-level pension, Wallace has shown that his brains can only be assuaged by satisfying a winner’s yearning, rather than a loser’s earning.

At his welcoming press conference, the front table was adorned by Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen.

Even if only the last one has appeared in a movie and has a formidable art collection (though even his may not be as impressive as Grant Hill’s), each of them exemplifies not merely basketball intelligence, but personal intelligence.

In Rasheed Wallace, they recognized one of their own. So they talked to him (even during games, according to Garnett) and appealed to his head rather than his man-purse.

Now, the Celtics have brains at almost every height. They have at least as much gray matter as green matter.

If only they could trade Rajon Rondo for Chauncey Billups.

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