In the locker room, the young players flung ice water into the air like madmen. The atmosphere had finally thawed completely.
Garnett was the first to sense that something was off... in the most satisfying way possible.
The nineteen-year-old high schooler immediately reverted to his shameless, motor-mouthed self. He squeezed himself between the two, waggling his eyebrows as he shouted, "Yo, yo, yo! You two made up? Those switches just now, damn, you were like conjoined twins! I thought you two were going to keep up the cold war until your contracts expired, then each head off to another team to be the top dog!"
"Get lost, Kevin." Jones wiped the sweat from his face, cracking a rare grin as he cursed at him.
Finley laughed too. He turned to Jones, hesitated, then offered his hand first. "Eddie... these last few games on offense, I held on to the ball too much. I was too selfish."
"I had my problems too." Jones took his hand, a rare trace of candor flashing in his eyes. "Since we're both wearing these green jerseys, let's tear the whole Eastern Conference apart together. From now on, when we're on the court, you watch my back, and I watch yours. With us working together, nobody gets easy buckets on Boston's perimeter."
Lin Qi stood outside the locker room, watching through the glass in the door. He tugged at his tie, the line of his mouth relaxing slightly.
He did not go inside to interrupt the young players' wild celebration. There was no need.
This had been a problem he had thrown to Thibodeau in the first place. Under the man-to-man rules of 1995, guarding "Penny" Hardaway one-on-one was a hopeless dead end. To win, these two wings who could not stand each other had to alternate frantically on defense to plug the holes. Once the instinct to survive and win overpowered their vanity, chemistry would naturally be forced into existence through intense physical combat.
Running a team was no different from commanding troops in battle... only fools tried to extinguish the ambition in a genius's eyes. A good helmsman only needed to establish the rules and minimize the losses from infighting.
Jones and Finley still would not become friends off the court. Back on the practice floor tomorrow, these two proud fellows would still defend each other with their bayonets drawn, trying every possible way to humiliate the other on every isolation possession.
But that did not matter.
At least from tonight onward, the destructive infighting between them, the kind that could drag the entire team down with it, had been forcibly bent into another form of healthy competition through the mechanism of coordinated defense.
"I have to be better than you" had become "There's no fucking way I'm becoming the dead weight you look down on out there."
As long as it produced that kind of chemistry, Lin Qi could not care less whether they were sworn brothers or complete strangers in private. As long as these two young wings could channel their efficiency in the same direction on the court, the Celtics' defensive floor was firmly secured.
Late that night, in the president of basketball operations' office.
Lin Qi sat alone at his desk, the desk lamp casting a dim yellow beam across his face. He leafed through the latest internal report delivered by the data company he owned. Every table and every string of proprietary statistics was a pleasure to behold.
In 1995, when even the concept of advanced metrics had yet to emerge, while other teams' general managers were still staring at traditional points and rebounds, Lin Qi had already used his company's top-secret reports to deliver an all-around dimensional reduction strike against the entire league.
The report showed that since the Death Lineup's modern rotational defense had taken shape, the Boston Celtics' defensive rating per hundred possessions had quietly climbed into the league's top five. On offense, Radja's role as the high-post passing hub was also running more and more smoothly thanks to the cuts and isolation plays of the two wing cornerstones.
This young team, a jumble of odds and ends that the entire Boston media had originally dismissed as a garbage heap, was growing wild at a terrifying speed visible to the naked eye.
Yet as Lin Qi stared at those cold numbers representing elite strength, there was little satisfaction in his dark eyes.
Instead, he suddenly broke out in a cold sweat.
The scene he had witnessed outside the locker room tonight had stirred an unprecedented wariness in this transmigrator, who was accustomed to viewing the world through cold logic.
He began to reflect.
He suddenly realized that he seemed to have fallen into a serious trap of arrogance before... he had put too much faith in data, in tactical concepts and talent on paper.
In a game, adding ability ratings together always gave a definite result. Stuffing the league's best young castoffs and most promising raw forwards into one locker room could indeed produce an astonishing ceiling on paper. But reality was not a video game. Behind those numbers were living, breathing geniuses with immense ambition and pride.
A team could never be judged solely by its strength on paper. It was also a matter of elusive chemistry.
Without good chemistry, this so-called "elite talent" and "strength on paper" would never become weapons that tore opponents apart. Instead, they would rapidly turn into the most brutal infighting between privileged players.
That poorly guided pride, those struggles over touches and status, would become a meat cleaver hacking inward once they spiraled out of control, tearing the entire team to shreds in an unguarded moment.
Tonight, he had used the outside force of "Penny" Hardaway to turn Jones's and Finley's blades away, as though narrowly escaping death. But what about next time? When there was not enough pie to share, not enough spotlight to go around, how many more times could he stop those inward-pointing blades?
In this savage era that worshipped muscle, if he wanted to pull off dimensional reduction strikes beyond the times, then as the helmsman, he had to handle these geniuses' tempers more carefully than anyone.
Lin Qi slowly exhaled, shifted his gaze away from those exquisite data reports, and reached over to turn to the next page of the schedule.
His gaze locked firmly onto a date in early December.
That day, the Boston Celtics would challenge the Philadelphia 76ers on the road.
That hometown All-Star point guard he had coldly shipped away over the summer, who had left the Boston media with the threat, "Just you wait. Sooner or later, I'll destroy you"-Dana Barros.
At that very moment, the undersized guard was furiously delivering on his perimeter talent in Philadelphia with one unreasonable twenty-plus-point night after another, while also sharpening his blade of revenge.
Lin Qi slowly closed the report.
He knew better than anyone that the approaching battle would be far more than an ordinary regular-season game.
It would be the first time this basketball timeline, which he had forcibly rewritten to run twenty years ahead of its era, turned back amid cold reality to personally ask him, the transmigrator, a question of the utmost cruelty...
Would history really let him mold it as he pleased, without any price to pay?