The resounding slap in the season opener had not kept Boston's media quiet for long.
Over the following week, the Celtics stumbled along.
The new system was like a newly assembled machine: every component was top of the line, but the gears still did not mesh smoothly enough.
Some games, they won through sheer talent; in others, their offense fell into disarray, and opponents seized the chance to steal a win.
The wins were not pretty.
Those reporters found their footing again:
"See? The opener was nothing but luck."
"That flashy system of Adelman's won't last long."
"A bunch of kids are still just kids."
But the game that truly made even Lin Qi sweat came in mid-November.
The New Jersey Nets, their road opponent that mid-November, were a famously tough nut to crack in the Eastern Conference.
Head coach Butch Beard was renowned throughout the league as a defensive taskmaster. The old coach believed above all in dragging games into suffocating half-court battles. Through physical combat, his entire team kept opponents' offensive efficiency pinned firmly in the league's lower-middle ranks.
Inside, they boasted the big, rugged Black duo of Clifford Robinson and Jason Williams. Robinson, one of the league's renowned defensive stalwarts, offered the threat of more than two blocks per game; Williams, meanwhile, was a truly terrifying monster even in this era of bruising contact. Last season, he had fought through the entire league's efforts to box him out to grab nearly five offensive rebounds per game, and his offensive rebounding percentage (ORB%) consistently stayed above a frightening 16%, ranking among the league's top three.
On the perimeter, the Nets had the supremely seasoned star point guard Kenny Anderson. That season, he averaged more than eight assists and nearly two steals, using his veteran experience to organize the tempo on offense while sticking to opponents like putty on defense until they could barely breathe.
This was as typical a middle-tier Eastern Conference team as they came... perhaps not the biggest name, but once they bared their defensive fangs, their seasoned toughness and physicality, which statistics could never fully capture, ensured that any powerhouse in the league would have to pay dearly against them.
The Celtics' starters seemed to have collectively fallen asleep that day.
Sam Cassell was ice-cold, clanging shot after shot. Radja was completely smothered at the high post, struggling both to facilitate and to move the ball; Jones's and Anderson's offense had gone silent as well.
Throughout the first half, the Celtics' dazzling system sputtered along like a sports car with a stalled engine.
By the third quarter, the Celtics trailed by a full sixteen points.
The home fans filled the arena with deafening boos and mockery.
On press row, someone had already begun drafting "Celtics' true colors exposed" in a notebook.
Adelman stood on the sideline, staring at the stalled starting unit on the floor for a full minute.
Then the usually mild-mannered, scholarly coach made a decision no one had expected.
He pulled almost all his starters.
Sam Cassell stayed.
For the other four spots, he brought in... Eddie Jones, Wesley Person, Tracy Murray, and Kevin Garnett.
It was an unorthodox lineup with no traditional interior player at all, five men who could all run, shoot, and switch everything.
Oh, except Murray, of course. This perimeter gunner was the only weak defensive link on the floor, but within an extremely disciplined rotation system, his fatal weakness would be thoroughly protected by the other four players' terrifying lateral quickness and aggression.
Switching everything in 1995, after all, was no different from dancing on a knife's edge.
The league then had strict "illegal defense rules," expressly forbidding any form of zone defense. Defenders had to stay locked onto their own men.
Under those harsh restrictions, if the Celtics switched frequently, the instant one player ended up in an ambiguous position near the paint during a handoff-neither fully attached to an off-ball player nor going to double-team the ball handler-the referee's whistle would sound immediately, handing the opponent a free throw and possession.
In other words, switching everything in 1995 demanded absurd levels of lateral quickness and precision in judging how the rules were enforced. To old-school coaches, it was not merely a cowardly evasion of individual defensive responsibility, but defensive suicide that handed points to the referees.
But the Celtics dared to field this lineup because they were betting their defensive personnel had the lateral speed and wingspan advantage to do it.
Jones stood 1.98 meters tall and had the strength of an elite small forward, along with lightning-fast lateral movement, allowing him to defend positions one through three.
Centers in the nineties, when switched onto smaller players, usually got blown past without ever getting near the ball. But the 1995 Garnett was one of the league's very few 2.11-meter monsters who could switch onto the perimeter and use his long legs to shut off the driving lanes of point guards standing a little over 1.8 meters.
Thibodeau growled from the side, "Full-court press! Get into them starting in their backcourt!"
Garnett bounded onto the court, turning as he ran to shout at his teammates on the bench, "Watch closely! Time to witness a miracle!"
"Make up those sixteen points before you start bragging." Sam Cassell smacked the back of his head in irritation.
What happened next went down in the Boston Celtics' history for that season.
It was a storm.
The moment the Death Lineup took the floor, the game's tempo shot up to a speed the opposition could not remotely match.
With his 2.11-meter height and guard-like footwork, Garnett began switching, trapping, and disrupting everything on defense.
Time after time, his switches dismantled their pick-and-rolls;
Time after time, those excessively long arms disrupted and severed their passing lanes.
Jones clung to their primary scorer like a starving wolf.
Murray and Person prowled on the perimeter.
For the first time, the opposing offense stalled.
And the Celtics' offense caught fire.
Garnett came up with a steal and, without dribbling himself, fired a long pass straight into Jones's hands as he raced downcourt...
A thunderous dunk!
On the next possession, Sam Cassell drove, drew a double-team, and kicked the ball out to the top of the arc.
Person caught it and fired...
Three!
On the possession after that, Murray slipped out of the corner off a rock-solid Garnett screen.
He caught the ball.
That frighteningly high release, clean and crisp...
Another three!
Tracy Murray, the castoff the entire league had dismissed as trash and Lin Qi had picked up for next to nothing, went fully into "Microwave" mode that quarter.
Swish.
Swish.
Swish.
Like a tireless launcher, he used countless screens to catch, shoot, and score relentlessly from the perimeter.
Three.
Three.
Another three!
The opposing defense had no attention to spare for this corner assassin... just handling Garnett's assaults, Sam Cassell's drives, and Eddie's fast breaks already had them scrambling.
Murray hit shot after shot in the quarter, pouring in more than ten points by himself.
The deafening boos in the road arena gradually turned to deathly silence, then finally to incredulous whispers.
The sixteen-point gap melted visibly like snow in sunlight, then vanished.
Garnett went completely wild on the floor.
After every defensive stop, every assist, and every thunderous dunk, he spread his arms toward the opposing fans and roared with his mouth wide open.
That motormouth of his hurled abuse at every last member of the opposing team.
Thibodeau wanted to yell at him from the sideline to rein it in, but watching the gap shrink rapidly on the scoreboard, he swallowed his words.
The Celtics put together a jaw-dropping run.
When the Death Lineup erased the deficit entirely and took the lead, even the home commentators rose to their feet.
In the final quarter, the opposition tried to rally.
But this insanely fast lineup had already thrown their rhythm into complete disarray.
Sam Cassell took over at the crucial moment, using several composed midrange jumpers and passes to firmly suppress their final rally.
The final buzzer sounded.
The Celtics had completed a sixteen-point comeback on the road.
The locker room erupted.
The young players howled, throwing towels and wristbands into the air.
This victory fired them up even more than the season opener... down sixteen, with everyone waiting for them to collapse, they had relied on themselves to finish their opponents with one decisive run.
And tonight's hero, Tracy Murray, was hoisted high by his teammates.
"Microwave! Microwave!"
Garnett led the way, shouting at the top of his lungs as he gave Murray a nickname.
"My God, Tracy! Were you using cheats on those threes?! That dude's face turned green! Greener than my jersey!"
Murray, the normally taciturn "journeyman," broke into a rare broad grin as these passionately enthusiastic young players held him up.
From the Trail Blazers to the Rockets, one team after another had kicked him around as a "defensive black hole."
Never had a team treated his shooting as a weapon for winning the way they had tonight.
Sam Cassell walked over and bumped fists with Murray.
"Great work, 'Microwave.'"
Lin Qi stood in the locker room doorway, watching the scene, and the weight in his heart finally lifted.
When he had picked up Murray for next to nothing, the head scout had still been muttering, "Another castoff who can't defend."
But tonight, this castoff had vindicated Lin Qi's eye for talent, "twenty years ahead of its time"...
In an era still blindly devoted to muscle and physical combat, spacing and shooting were the sharpest weapons.
Garnett's and Jones's switching had thoroughly covered Murray's defensive holes.
And his shooting had become the blade that pierced their opponents.
This was the most resounding realization on the court of the very logic Lin Qi had laid out to the head scout.
The next day, the tone of Boston's newspapers changed.
The dinosaurs who had been predicting doom yesterday quietly changed their tune in today's headlines.
"Sixteen-point comeback! Boston's young guns unleash a terrifying knockout run"
"'Microwave' Murray: an abandoned shooter finds a home in Boston"
"Maybe... Lin Qi really saw something we didn't?"
That last headline made Lin Qi laugh out loud.
"Saw something we didn't."
He handed the newspaper to the head scout beside him.
"See? They're starting to change their tune."
The head scout scratched his head, a little embarrassed.
"Lin, I was calling Murray trash before..."
Lin Qi patted his shoulder.
"Every other general manager in the league thought he was trash. That's why I could pick him up on such a cheap contract."
He looked out the window.
This young team was gradually prying apart everyone's prejudices in a way no one had ever seen.
The opener had dazzled.
This comeback had stunned.
But Lin Qi knew that the stronger their momentum, the more vigilant he had to be.
The more their talent delivered, the more conflicts would surface.
On a team, the shooters, the drivers, and the defenders all wanted to prove themselves.
The pie was only so big.
As the wins piled up and the spotlight grew brighter, who should get a bigger slice, and who should give one up... sooner or later, that issue would explode.
And the most deeply buried thorn was already, quietly, digging ever deeper between two people.
Eddie Jones...
And Michael Finley.