April arrived, and spring came slowly to Boston, but the regular season's final push had already reached fever pitch.
The three ironclad rules Lin Qi had established after All-Star Weekend began paying him the richest dividends, with interest, in the season's final month.
Dominique Wilkins had been brought into peak physical condition. Two full months of load management had given the thirty-four-year-old veteran's previously badly injured Achilles tendon all the respite it needed. While the league's other core players were being drained by the packed late-season schedule, Wilkins was like a meticulously maintained divine weapon, unsheathed with a vengeance in April.
His trademark ability to deliver in the clutch returned in full.
In the first week of April, they faced a tough opponent on the road, one fighting tooth and nail for a playoff spot. The teams were tied with two minutes remaining. Sam Cassell used his signature drive as a feint, successfully drawing the defense's attention firmly onto himself. This time, instead of blindly charging into a crowd as he had in December, he calmly raised his head and flicked his wrist, whipping the ball precisely to the top of the arc.
Wilkins caught it, rose, and pulled up.
Swish. A clean, decisive game-winner.
The veteran assassin whom the media had labeled "washed up" and the All-Star roster had shut out finally showed his edge again at the season's most critical stage. He no longer needed an obsessively high-scoring night to prove himself to management. He only needed to put the damn ball securely through the hoop when the game became most suffocating.
And Cassell, the young point guard who had once seen nothing but the basket in the fourth quarter, had now fully learned to put the ball in the hands of a more reliable finisher during the most crucial deadlocks. He was no longer merely a reckless brute charging on instinct. He was beginning to truly understand when to organize the offense and let better-positioned teammates find their touch first.
This was precisely the budding form of the starting floor general Lin Qi had always wanted to build for a powerhouse franchise.
The Celtics went 6-1 throughout April. As the final buzzer sounded on their last regular-season game at home in the Old Boston Garden, their final season record settled on the scoreboard.
47 wins, 35 losses. Fifth in the Eastern Conference.
The visitors' locker room instantly erupted in celebration, the young players slapping one another on the shoulders. Six months earlier, they had been a "general store" mocked by media across America. Six months later, they had marched proudly into the playoffs as the Eastern Conference's fifth seed.
Standing at the locker-room entrance, Lin Qi was tallying a different, perfectly clear set of accounts.
All three conditions on the wager note Gaston kept beneath the glass on his desk had now been fulfilled.
A playoff berth: 47 wins and fifth in the Eastern Conference. Achieved.
Arena attendance: Wilkins's box-office appeal and the entertainment value of this new team built around pace and space had packed the Old Boston Garden's stands every game, returning attendance to the league's top ten. Achieved.
Payroll control: through meticulous maneuvering on draft night and subsequent salary matching and reshuffling, the total payroll had not budged. Achieved.
The night of the season's final game, in the chairman's office on the top floor.
Owner Paul Gaston summoned Lin Qi upstairs. The second-generation owner held a glass of champagne, wearing the most relaxed and sincere smile Lin Qi had seen from him in six months. A brand-new contract lay neatly spread across the desk. It was not a temporary letter of authorization, but a weighty, genuine contract for the president of basketball operations.
"Lin," Gaston said, pushing the contract toward him, "six months ago, I thought you were a madman gambling away your entire future. A level-two scout making less than sixty thousand dollars a year came to bet me that a lousy thirty-two-win team could make the playoffs without management spending another cent. What's even more outrageous is that you actually pulled it off."
Lin Qi did not rush to pick up the pen. His eyes went to the terms first.
Five-year total: $3.5 million, increasing by an equal amount each year.
Year one: $500,000.
Year two: $600,000.
Year three: $700,000.
Year four: $800,000.
Year five: $900,000.
Also included were substantial additional performance bonuses for reaching the playoffs, the Eastern Conference Finals, the NBA Finals, and winning the championship.
For a twenty-nine-year-old who had still been sitting in a dark corner of the scouting department six months earlier, this was undoubtedly a leap in social standing. But what truly held Lin Qi's gaze was not that string of figures. It was the final clause, deliberately printed in bold.
For the duration of the contract, Lin Qi would hold absolute final decision-making authority over all basketball operations of the Boston Celtics. Draft selections, trades, free agency moves, coaching staff changes, and the development of the scouting system would all be decided by him alone. The owner and board of directors could not interfere with any professional judgment concerning purely basketball matters.
Gaston watched him, his flippant smile fading as his tone turned utterly serious. "I'll still pay your original salary for this season. Under the terms of our wager, the additional hundred and fifty thousand dollars in performance bonuses will be deposited into your account as well. Lin, I've rarely volunteered to pay anyone more money in my life. But this time, I concede."
Only then did Lin Qi calmly pick up the fountain pen and sign his name at the bottom of the contract. From this moment on, he was no longer an interim representative who had temporarily risen through a huge gamble. He was the rightful highest decision-maker of the Boston Celtics.
"Mr. Gaston," Lin Qi said, looking up after signing, "this is only the beginning."
Gaston raised his eyebrows. "Oh? What else do you want?"
"What I intend to do is hang a new championship banner beside those sixteen overhead, with my own hands," Lin Qi answered calmly.
Gaston froze. Six months earlier, he would have considered it the ravings of a lunatic. Yet now, looking at the unfathomable young president before him, he found himself unable to argue in that instant.
"Then prove it to me in the playoffs first." Gaston raised his champagne glass. "Don't let me down, Mr. President."
After signing the contract, Lin Qi did not go to the locker room to join the players' celebration. He understood perfectly well that forty-seven regular-season wins were merely an admission ticket. The playoffs ahead were the true killing ground.
When the final team practice before the playoff opener ended, Lin Qi did not go inside to give any perfunctory motivational speech. He left that sacred locker room to the team's one unshakable anchor-Robert Parish.
The forty-one-year-old Old Chief sat in front of his locker, unhurriedly tying his shoelaces and wrapping his thick knee supports. He had watched these youngsters fight over the ball, argue, and batter one another bloody, before gradually learning how to win. But when the moment came to establish a clear direction, his authority as a decorated veteran was irreplaceable.
Parish slowly stood and surveyed his young, restless teammates, who had just tasted victory and were getting a little carried away.
Sam Cassell, Jones, Dominique Wilkins, Radja, Barros, Person...
The veteran began slowly, his rough voice as steady as stone.
"You played well in the regular season. But the regular season proves nothing."
"I've won three championships, and right now, I'm only going to tell you one thing. On the playoff battlefield, there are only two kinds of teams. One is willing to put everything on the line for each other on defense. The other is a lousy team where everyone plays for himself, then goes home fishing."
Parish tied his final shoelace and stared coldly at the youngsters. "Over the past six months, all you've learned is how to play together. Now that we're in the playoffs, I want to see whether you're actually willing to fight for one another."
With that, the veteran calmly sat back down and continued tending to his shoes.
There was not a single grandiose shout, let alone any cheap, rousing slogan.
Yet the eyes of those young troublemakers in the locker room all lit up.
Lin Qi listened to the entire speech from outside the half-closed door, the corners of his mouth lifting slightly. He knew that the team he had poured his heart and effort into assembling had finally, at this moment, been infused with the true soul of the Celtics.
They were completely ready.
The final playoff matchups were soon officially announced.
The fifth-seeded Boston Celtics would face the fourth-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round.
Lin Qi looked at the matchup on his office whiteboard and let out a long breath.
The 1995 Cleveland Cavaliers, coached by Mike Fratello, played slowly, defended hard, and maintained strict discipline. They habitually minimized possessions in half-court play, wearing opponents down bit by bit through physical combat. Yet this traditional powerhouse, built on the defensive logic of an older era, was an aggravatingly tough nut to crack in everyone else's eyes, while to Lin Qi, it had run straight into the new Celtics' core style of play.
"Tell everyone they have two days off to rest. Then we're going to Cleveland," Lin Qi told Coach Ford, closing his playbook.
He turned his gaze toward the practice court. There, starting shooting guard Eddie Jones stood alone in a corner, practicing free throw after free throw.
After enduring the relentless scorching of Michael Jordan's elite offensive firepower in late March, the young rookie now had a look in his eyes on defense that bore no resemblance to the timid newcomer who had let Wilkins test him in isolation six months earlier.
Watching Jones's shadow stretch beneath the lights, Lin Qi murmured to himself, "It's time he left his name on this stage, too."
The curtain had risen on the playoffs.
And the story of this young Boston team had officially entered its most brutal, most blood-stirring chapter.