On the morning after the playoffs ended, a belated spring rain fell over Boston.
Lin Qi sat alone high in the empty stands of the Old Boston Garden, watching arena workers take down and gather up, one by one, the playoff banners that had hung for a month. The arena was quiet, with only the dull echoes of raindrops striking the old wooden roof.
He had sat there for a long time, calmly reviewing the ups and downs of the entire past season in his mind.
At this time a year ago, he had been nothing more than an obscure second-tier supervisor in the scouting department. The Celtics had been a mess with just 32 wins and 50 losses, their core players retiring or suffering major injuries one after another. The local media had mocked them as a sinking wreck. To move up, he had signed that almost insane performance wager: get the team into the playoffs over the course of one summer without adding a single cent to the budget, while bringing arena attendance back into the league's top ten.
At the time, more than half the league had considered it an episode of madness staged by a low-level employee desperate to make a name for himself.
Yet a year later, the dust had settled: 47 wins and 35 losses, fifth in the Eastern Conference. They had eliminated Cleveland 3-2 in the first round of the playoffs, then dragged the New York Knicks, a team of Eastern Conference championship caliber, all the way to Game 7 at Madison Square Garden in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
All three core targets on the performance agreement beneath the glass in the general manager's office had been met. He had not only won himself a five-year contract, but also secured full, legitimate authority over every basketball decision for the Celtics.
But sitting in the cold stands, Lin Qi knew that the real wealth he had accumulated over the past season was that group of players he had picked up from every corner of the league, who had ultimately reclaimed their professional dignity in Boston.
Sam Cassell had gone from a third-string point guard with little control over his own fate on Houston's championship bench to a fully qualified starting point guard this season. His averages of 15.2 points and 7.1 assists had come with a relatively high turnover rate, but his unselfish play in crucial playoff moments marked his transition from an instinct-driven reserve charging forward to a starting floor general who controlled the whole game.
Eddie Jones, the ninth pick whom he had snatched from under Jerry West's nose despite pressure from every side, had shed his rookie rawness after being put through Michael Jordan's boot camp and the physical playoff warfare against the New York Knicks. His averages of 12.8 points and 2.0 steals, along with his All-Rookie First Team selection, had been earned through game after game of tireless, tight on-ball defense.
Dominique Wilkins, the elite scorer whom the Hawks had shopped, the Clippers had given up on, and the All-Star Game had humiliatingly shut out, had silenced every media outlet pessimistic about his Achilles injury with 18.7 points per game and one unstoppable turnaround fadeaway after another in playoff fourth quarters. Though he still had not won the championship ring he craved, his play had proved what the old assassin still had in reserve.
Then there was Radja's reliable baseline in the half-court offense, the three-point spacing provided by Barros and Person, Elliott's role in holding the locker room together, and veteran Parish's steadying presence at critical moments, when every word he spoke carried enormous weight.
This group of players capable of contributing immediately, with clear strengths and weaknesses on the free-agent market, had been forged over just one season together into an iron army willing to fight for one another on defense.
That was Lin Qi's most essential trump card.
The rain gradually stopped, and the sound of water leaking through the arena roof began to fade.
Lin Qi stood and brushed the dust from his suit trousers. Yet just as he was about to leave the stands, a rational thought quietly surfaced, stopping him in his tracks.
He had taken a beautiful first step and won decisively. But he understood a secret no one else could perceive better than anyone: his path to success this year could not be replicated.
Over the past season, he had been able to assemble this roster at minimal cost because he possessed absolute foreknowledge of league rule changes and the course of players' health. He had known in advance that David Stern would shorten the three-point line to rescue television ratings, so he had moved early to secure undersized but highly accurate shooters on the free-agent market. He had known that Sean Elliott's kidney disease would not prematurely end his career, which was why he had dared to buy low when front offices across the league were keeping their distance. He had understood that Sam Cassell had the heart for big moments, and that Barros could reap the full benefits of the new rules.
He had exploited the information gap and blind spots in the reactions of front offices across the league.
But that window for "finding bargains" was rapidly closing.
After experiencing the Celtics' storm of modern tactics this season, the league's general managers had effectively been forced to attend an open lesson through actual competition. The academically minded executives who had once mocked Lin Qi had now woken up. They had begun reassessing the unremarkable pure shooters on their own rosters, studying every word of the new rules David Stern had introduced, and maintaining a high level of vigilance toward even the slightest move by Boston's front office.
The age of bargains was drawing to a close. In future free-agent markets and trade negotiations, overlooked value would become harder and harder to find.
And the more practical crisis was that the tactical balance of this roster, built to capitalize on the new rules, had already reached its ceiling.
In the final two minutes of Game 7, the New York Knicks had used the most basic strength and bulk to brutally lay the new Celtics' fatal weakness bare before Lin Qi: when a series entered its rawest stage of attrition, when the opponent possessed a true paint monster like Patrick Ewing, with overwhelming bulk and interior dominance, this lightweight Boston Celtics team, built around speed and stretching defenses with spacing, would simply be battered through in the heart of its defensive paint.
Wilkins's body would continue to age irreversibly, Radja lacked the bulk needed to withstand contact as an elite interior cornerstone, and Sam Cassell's ceiling had already revealed itself against the Game 7 double-teams. This team could become a tough playoff opponent that gave any powerhouse headaches, but if it wanted to get past the Orlando Magic and the Chicago Bulls, who were about to return to full strength, this configuration could never become a dynasty.
It lacked a true centerpiece. A supreme talent who could single-handedly carry the team across the gulf in strength and overturn the entire Eastern Conference's interior offensive and defensive landscape.
And with the whole league on alert in the future, a franchise cornerstone of that caliber could never be acquired through a cheap sell-off or a bargain pickup.
Lin Qi raised his head toward the sixteen green championship banners hanging high beneath the arena's dome. In the faint light, they looked solemn and weighty. At the very edge, an empty space waited to be filled.
Jerry West's warning during that phone call a few days earlier echoed in his ears again: "Your team this year is missing a true genius. The draft is in two months. I'll see you there."
Lin Qi closed his eyes, and in his mind appeared the young man who was still playing high school basketball in Chicago at this very moment, thin as a bamboo pole, yet possessing mobility and defensive coverage ahead of his time.
Kevin Garnett.
In the actual course of basketball history, doubts among front offices across the league about how a high school player would handle physical competition would ultimately cause this kid to slip to the fifth pick in the 1995 draft, where the Minnesota Timberwolves team would select him.
But as the ultimate decision-maker with a view of the future, Lin Qi knew better than anyone what superstar qualities this young man possessed-qualities capable of rewriting the next twenty years of a storied franchise's fate.
What he understood even more clearly was that, to bring this kid to Boston before the Minnesota Timberwolves or any other rival who might cut in, the two 1995 first-round picks and the Clippers' future first-round pick he had accumulated through meticulous maneuvering still did not provide a sufficiently secure asset package. If he wanted to leave nothing to chance, he would have to offer genuine core assets with undeniable appeal on the summer trade market.
That meant he would have to willingly take a painful loss, personally dismantling certain key pieces of the core roster he had poured his heart into building, a roster even Boston's local fans had only just fallen in love with.
Lin Qi stood at the edge of the empty stands a little longer.
He knew very well that once he chose to disrupt their current chemistry this summer, the accusations and abuse awaiting him would be even fiercer and more overwhelming than during last summer's "tear it down and rebuild" effort. Boston's media would once again brand him a tactical opportunist, and after seeing the result of a first-round Game 7, the owner, Gaston, would be unable to understand why he was going mad again immediately after fulfilling the performance wager.
But that was the price of being a prophet. To see farther than everyone else meant having to bear the whole world's doubts and incomprehension alone before the right moment arrived.
Lin Qi took one last look at the championship banner space that had remained empty for nearly a decade, then turned and descended the stands with firm steps, heading toward the narrow players' tunnel.
The first season's 47 wins and Game 7 elimination were merely an admission ticket he had earned in the first year of the new rules. The coming deal would be the ultimate gamble that truly determined whether the Boston Celtics became "a formidable playoff team that gave people headaches" or "a green dynasty worthy of the history books."
In two months, the smoke of battle would rise at the draft.
This time, he would gamble on a future that only he could see.