Name your price Portland

The Celtics are screwed.

I'm a bit ashamed at how tense the NBA's Draft lottery was for me. When have I ever cared about this event with more than passing interest? How did determining the draft order become as excruciating as having my Derby trifecta foiled yet again?

And I'm not even a Celtics fan. More of a Boston well-wisher. An interested NBA fan who thinks it would be nice if the Celtics were at least watchable.

That's not going to happen for some time.

Let's be honest, the Celtics prospects of being good anytime in the near future are far worse than inversely proportional to the odds they bucked to end up with the fifth pick in the Draft. They have one player worth keeping on their current roster, Al Jefferson, and he's far from a franchise cornerstone. Nice player? Yes. The kind of guy who wins you playoff games on his own? No.

Paul Pierce should be immediately shipped to Minnesota--might as well go straight up for their seventh pick--so he and Kevin Garnett can wallow in their "good-to-great without anything close to a championship" status together. (Side note: Portland had as good a shot at winning the lottery as Minnesota did. The NBA gods hate Garnett and the Celtics. Fantastic.)

You can barely even call the cupboard bare. Tony Allen and Ryan Gomes are solid contributors...if they were on the Spurs where they could play 16 minutes a game and feed off Duncan double-teams. Gerald Green is young and athletic but so was Kerri Strug.

Beyond everyone mentioned above, you have Perkins, Olowokandi, Powe, Ratliff, Ray, Rondo, Scalabrine, Szczerbiak, and West on the current roster. Don't listen to anyone who tells you it's not the end of the world, it is. I don't care how deep this year's draft is, who can the Celtics draft that will help the team in even the near future?

No matter who it is, it will always feel like choosing the door that had a donkey and cart behind it on Let's Make a Deal. To spare that poor player and the seven Celtics fans remaining in the world such a cruel fate, I've prepared a couple of different offers for the Portland brass and their keys to Duranden:

1. Paul Pierce, Gerald Green, the Bruins, the gyroball owner's manual and Schilling's bloody sock - You have neither a baseball nor a hockey history to speak of, now you do.
2. Al Jefferson, Eliza Dushku, Tom Brady and Boston will take total responsibility for everything J.R. Rider, Bill Walton, Ruben Patterson and Sebastian Telfair have ever said or done or will say and do - It's like an incredibly attractive steak with a decent low post game to remove all the black eyes your city has experienced in the past 30 years.
3. Al Jefferson, Paul Pierce, Gerald Green, 3 1/2 games off the Red Sox current lead over the Yankees, a lifetime contract for Doc Rivers AND Curt Schilling will ghost write Zach Randolph's blog for an entire season - That is, in order, everything the Celtics have, the only thing Bostonians have to hang their hat on currently, the only thing worse than this lottery draw and instant, unwanted headlines for an entire year all in one package.

Of course, Danny Ainge is willing to listen to any reasonable counteroffers. Or just any counteroffers. The only thing that's untouchable is the 2004 World Series.