The Celtics will gather tomorrow at their practice facility in Waltham for Media Day. It is a perfectly fine home for the club, a private section of a larger building that includes a health club and medical facilities.
But in the ever growing and modernising NBA sphere, the footprint no longer measures up to the Celts’ needs. So, as announced earlier this year, the club is expecting to move into a new building at Boston Landing in 2018. Groundbreaking for the development, between the Bruins’ new practice rink and the New Balance Building hard by the Mass Pike, will come later this fall.
In addition to more court space, the Celts will gain greater room for corporate and community functions, and be closer to the team’s downtown offices. But what will it mean to the product, to the people in sneakers?
According to Danny Ainge, quite a bit. “It is a big deal,” said the Celts’ president of basketball operations. “It’s a big deal for our players, and it’ll be a big deal for our team to have two regulation courts. I mean, that’s probably the biggest thing. Our facility’s good now, but one court’s not enough. I mean, with 15 players, we need two courts. We don’t have enough space. We’re trying to build a better facility to become a better team.”
“But,” he added, “we won 17 banners with one court, so it’s not, like,
mandatory.”
Actually, the Celtics won some of those banners with barely one practice court, having to share space at various locales. In fact, the C’s have won exactly one championship when they had a court to call their own. They moved into their current digs in 1999, skipping across town from Brandeis.
“This will be better for training,” Ainge said. “We have more bang for the buck with our players. And some players really do care about it. They’re coming from some college programs with spectacular training facilities. I think it’ll be a great thing for our players, and maybe they’ll spend more time at our facility. I don’t know. That’s what we’re hoping.”
There is evidence to support that theory. Brett Brown and the 76ers are about to move into a new facility in Camden, NJ, and the coach is hoping to get some of the same benefits he saw in his first NBA job.
“My first year in the league was with the Spurs, who had just built their own practice facility,” said Brown. “They were amongst a small handful of teams that had their own facility. I was called the director of player development, and I asked Pop (Gregg Popovich), ‘What does that mean?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. You figure it out.’
“But you had this two-court, six-basket, perfectly-spaced facility with a food area and a pool and weight room that was an environment where the players could come at any time they wanted. It became like a Field of Dreams thing: if you build it, they will come. All day, people would be coming in and out — late at night, early in the morning. It was theirs. They could take ownership in it. It was close. It was comfortable. You could eat with a teammate. You could play video games with a teammate. You could practice hard with teammates. I just think it’s another extension of how you build culture. It was everything to the Spurs.”
No one would argue that a practice palace is “everything” when it comes to attracting free agents, but Brown believes it can help with recruiting.
“How can it not? When they come and they see the professionalism,” he said, “and just hang on that word for a moment. When they see the professionalism that is required nowadays, from sports science to rehab and prehab and weightlifting and nutrition, it has to have an effect.
“We all talk the talk, but to put them in an environment where here it is has to have an effect.
“If it’s any responsibility we all have, it’s to keep our players healthy. It might be the Holy Grail among all the things that we talk about. So from perspective alone, you can better achieve that under your own roof.”
Though it’s two years away, Ainge will be showing artist renderings of the Celtics’ new joint when next he pitches free agents.
“It is a factor sometimes,” he said. “Some players care a great deal about that stuff and some don’t, but it can be a factor, absolutely. The facility and the amenities are a factor, for sure. And I think the location will give the players more options on where to live. We’ve had a lot of players that have loved living in Lincoln and Wellesley and Weston for the great public school systems, and they can still do that. But now it’ll be easier for the guys who want to live closer to the city or in the city.”
The Bulls are seeing the benefit of moving from the far north suburbs of Chicago to a built-to-spec site adjacent to the United Center.
“You just want to have a first class facility with all the amenities and all the equipment from a health care standpoint and training standpoint,” said Bulls general manager Gar Forman. “We did have a great facility, but we had outgrown it in some ways, and we wanted to get downtown with the convenience for our players. It’s been terrific for us.”
