Daunte Culpepper isn't likely to save the Oakland Raiders from another hard year. And Kevin Garnett won't make the Boston Celtics a title contender in the Eastern Conference.
But they are NAMES, and we love NAMES. NAMES have done great things in the past, or looked like they were going to. They make their new teams intriguing because their NAMES are attached to them.
We ask too much of them, though. We always do.
Garnett's trade to Boston in exchange for several itinerant Celtics and a four-year extension on his elephantine contract made the Celtics an Eastern Conference power again, after the lost 15 years of the post-Bird Era. That is, if you believed the drooly hysteria you read and heard over the last week.
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| Kevin Garnett might actually have been better off in Minnesota. (AP) |
And nobody tries to explain how the Celtics are suddenly the equal of the Pistons, Heat, Bulls or Wizards, because they can't. Not with a straight face, anyway. They are, at best, scrambling to get to that second rung on the Eastern stepstool, the kind of team that wins 39 games and is in the hunt for a playoff berth until the end.
But Garnett is a NAME, surrounded by two other NAMES in Allen and Pierce, and so those who don't say they can win the conference say that they are "relevant" again, which is a keen word that in this context means "OK, I'll watch 'em if I don't have anything better to do."
You see, while Garnett was and is a sensational player, he is once again surrounded by substandard support (and no, we are not speaking of Pierce and Allen as support, but the other nine players, if they can afford that many), plus he is working for a general manager and coach (Danny Ainge and Doc Rivers) who are probably holding their jobs by their teeth. This actually looks worse the longer you look at it, but we love stars, and Kevin Garnett is a star. Better, he is a NAME, and we think NAMES can solve any problem, even this one.
So good luck on that one.
As for Culpepper, he has signed a one-year deal to rent in Oakland, who have been the Celtics of football for the last few years. Culpepper is a NAME, too, even though he was hurt all of 2005 and had a terrible experience with Nick Saban in Miami in '06. He is coming to a team that doesn't have equivalents for Paul Pierce or Ray Allen, one which managed last year to perform the extraordinary feat of finishing 12 games behind its division leader in a 16-game schedule. If anything, the Raiders of '06 were worse at what they did than the '07 Celtics were at what they did.
And unlike the Celtics, who are now married to Garnett for years to come, Culpepper goes to the Raiders as a layover until a better destination comes along next year. He has superficial comparison points to unsigned draft choice JaMarcus Russell, and he could serve as a starter and mentor (or backup and mentor, if the Raiders want to irritate the hell out of him), but our interest is strictly based on Culpepper being a NAME. He once led the Vikings to a 11-5 record, then without Randy Moss (who preceded him in Oakland and essentially removed himself from the Hall of Fame as a result) faded, was catastrophically injured, and served as his own agent to get a flexible deal that would put him back on the market next year.
This, then, doesn't sound like anything other than two sides in a jam who happened to have what the other side wanted, and much less a matter of the Raiders wanting another NAME from that mythical Viking team nobody remembers anyway.
Still, it has our interest because Culpepper is, in fact, still a NAME, and everyone is still a sucker for a NAME.
In fact, you know who else is a NAME? Michael Vick. But that's another story, or stories, for other times.
