I am not often given to quoting Scripture in this space, but tonight it seems appropriate. In Proverbs Chapter 11 Verse 29, there is an eloquent bit of advice from King Solomon, it reads: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind and the fool shall be the servant of the wise at heart." Unfortunately, Danny Ainge probably didn't read that particular passage before he dealt Antoine Walker to the Mavericks in 2003.

Tonight has just provided the culmination of the Boston Celtics inheriting the wind from that bad trade. I predicted (one of the very few instances where I have been correct) that the Celtics would lose out on the Oden-Durant sweepstakes. I didn't dare hope, however, that they would fall all the way to 5th in this year's draft. This team earned this karmic suplex by making bad choice after bad choice and then compounding the affront to good taste that was this season by tanking games down the stretch.

Why did Danny Ainge deserve a chance to derail the career of Greg Oden or Kevin Durant? Because he's honestly submitted his best effort at producing a winning team in his four seasons at the helm? Because he conducted himself as a model of professional decorum? Because the two best things about his reign are the creation of a cheerleading squad and unloading Raef LaFrentz? It never ceases to amaze me that this man is still employed. I could work 2 hours a week and do a better job than he's done. Hell, the monkeys at the zoo could do a better job and still have plenty of time to fling feces at one another.

Take a look at the Celtics trades under Ainge. This list of transactions made by the team since he took over basketball operations is an appalling roster of ill-conceived decisions. Since when has it been advisable to shuffle players in and out of an organization? And yet it's the Ainge MO. So the question lingers for Celtics fans: do you want Ainge to use the pick or trade it?

They traded the rights to Randy Foye to Portland for Sebastian Telfair and the carcase of Theo Ratliff (who earned $1 million for every four minutes of basketball he played this season), Foye went on to earn a place on the NBA All Rookie Team. Portland turned around and traded Foye for the rights to Brandon Roy who won the Rookie of the Year award. Telfair is going to be cut from the team because his play was sub-par and his off-court behavior unacceptable. So that's what Ainge can do with a draft pick when it comes time to trade.

Among the veterans he has managed to acquire include Ratliff, Chris Mills and Raef LaFrentz. Ainge has managed to come out on the winning end of a trade once, when Gary Payton refused to report to Atlanta after the Cs traded him for Antoine Walker. When the Hawks cut Payton, he returned to the Celtics. So does that inspire confidence that the Celtics could somehow trade a pick that will not become Oden or Durant in a package with Pierce or one of their young players for Garnett or Gasol or Jermaine O'Neal or some mystery player who might not suck as a Celtic?

I have found myself wondering lately whether Ainge's determination to get into one-sided trades which have benefited the Trail Blazers at the expense of the Celtics have some connection to the shameful manner in which he stabbed the Blazers in the back in 1992. In case you have forgotten the story, Ainge (an Oregon native, by the way) was on the Blazers as the 1991-92 season ended and was due to be a free agent.

He promised the team and the fans he wanted to stay and would contact the team to make the necessary arrangements. And then, all of a sudden, on the very first day of the signing period, Ainge came to terms with the Phoenix Suns. I am all for clearing one's conscience and atoning for past transgressions, but I must say I hate to see the Boston Celtics serve as a vehicle to help their GM help a team he shafted 15 years ago.

Then there is the fact that some player from the Roy Hibbert, Joakim Noah, Al Horford, Brandan Wright, Corey Brewer or Yi Jianlian mix will be available in the fifth spot. I have heard as many times as you have that this is a ridiculously deep draft. Maybe I'm stubborn (I'm not alone, my man in Maine emailed me tonight to complain that this draft isn't what it's been billed to be), but I'm not convinced.

Roy Hibbert is a project. He may be great, and for the sake of the league he'd better be great. Greg Oden needs a rival like I need to marry a beautiful heiress. But Hibbert's not going to come in right away and dominate. Frankly, I'm barely willing to believe that he can come in and contribute. Think Emeka Okafor with a steeper learning curve, and I think you'll have a good picture of what Hibbert's future is going to be for two, maybe three years.

I have expressed my distaste for Joakim Noah's ability to play in the NBA a number of times in this space. He's not big enough to play NBA big men. He's not quick enough to hang with a Nowitzki or a Bargniani. He's nowhere near polished enough to score from the perimeter, and he handles the rock like a wildebeast calf on ice. Joakim Noah will be the death (certainly from a career stand point, and maybe literally also) of an NBA GM. I don't want it to be Ainge, though, as the Cs would be stuck with Noah, or Acie Earl with less marketability and talent.

Horford is probably the best of this sorry lot, provided you want a player to come in and help a team win games in the near term (of course one wonders whether NBA teams really want to win based on their personnel choices). The problem here is that he seems to be a more athletic version of Al Jefferson. Al has impressed a lot of Cs fans and the reporters who cover the team, but I still believe he's at his ceiling right now. Adding another power forward named Al won't help him. Plus, as much as I like his game, I don't think he's worth half of what the number five pick in this draft will earn.

Brandan Wright is a great unknown. He has all the potential any basketball fan could dream of, but he isn't seasoned enough to be the face of a franchise. To my way of thinking that's what the Cs need more than anything right now. They have too many young players with potential trying to develop into solid pros as it is, one more guy like this isn't going to help the team, especially when they're in salary cap hell and there aren't enough minutes and shots to go around.

I don't know enough about Yi Jianlian to offer any kind of assessment of his game. Beyond hearing that he's a Chinese Dirk Nowitzki on Outside the Lines the other day, I know nothing about him. I can spell his name only because I have today's Globe sitting on the desk in front of me. I do know that Yao Ming is monstrously overrated. He's an adequate big man benefiting from the total lack of centers in today's NBA. He ought to be able to score 30 points a night when he's 7 inches taller than 95% of the guys trying to cover him. So I would be inclined to stay away from another Chinese player, considering how much money goes to a #5 pick.

Corey Brewer captured the attention of fans across the country with his defensive play in this year's NCAA tournament (and last year too, but I try not to face the fact that Florida won two consecutive championships). This instantly makes him the most NBA ready guard of his generation. It's a little knows fact, but if you can handle Aaron Afflalo and Mike Conley Jr., then you can shut down any player on any team at any time. I bet you Iverson is soiling his drawers at the prospect of facing Brewer as we speak. Give me a break, he's not ready for prime time. At least not for $50 million.

And that is why I am so happy tonight. The lottery was Danny Ainge's last shot at keeping his job beyond this season. He can't keep getting chances to ruin what little future this franchise has. Maybe Jefferson, West, Rondo, Perkins, Powe, Gomes and the rest are better than I think. Maybe they're a lot better. But with the group of them competing for minutes, touches and shots there is no way that this group of players can form a team. They need leadership, and the team has no pieces to trade to get value in return.

This situation is so very perfect for Ainge. He traded Walker and then gradually had to punt away the magic beans he got in return. And even better, he acquired Telfair in his scramble to get out from under that Walker trade and that blew up in his face. He traded for Ricky Davis only to give up on him a little over a year later. In short, he created a hell of a lot of trouble in his own house and he just inherited the wind losing this lottery.

And if you aren't miserable enough, Celtics fans, just think... Portland got Brandon Roy thanks to the Cs terrible draft day trade last year. Now they have the inside track on Oden even though they had a 5.3% chance to win the lottery. At least the Cs threw one hell of a lottery party at Clery's on Dartmouth Street. I couldn't quite make it, I still remember a time when the Celtics didn't throw parties for anything short of a title.

In the May 22, 1974 issue of Rolling Stone, Jon Landau famously wrote: "I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen." We haven't seen the future of the NBA yet, but we will this weekend. It really doesn't matter, either, who ends up winning this year's NCAA championship. What does matter, for the future of the NBA, is that we'll see if Roy Hibbert can be the rival Greg Oden needs to save the NBA on Saturday.

Make no mistake about it. The NBA needs salvation desperately. Ratings peaked in 1998, and they show no signs of getting back to that level any time soon. There is even a great deal of consternation in some circles that Major League Baseball has scheduled a game between the Red Sox and the Yankees up against an opening round playoff basketball game. Can you imagine the NFL fearing to schedule a playoff game against another sport's regular season game?

Anybody who tells you that the NBA's ratings are falling because of the hip hop culture or mainstream white Americans turning away from it are full of sanctimony and not correct. At the end of the day, people want one thing, and one thing only from sports. It isn't cultural commentary or the world of yesteryear. People could care less about how long the player's shorts are, what kind of music they listen to or what they wear. They want to see good basketball and nothing more.

The ratings are falling because basketball is not being played the way it was intended by Dr. Naismith. Basketball is not being played the way the Russell era Celtics played it. Basketball is not being played the way the Showtime Lakers of the 1980s played it. And it's not really being played the way Jordan played it.

In a sense, it's Jordan's fault that the ratings are falling. And not because he retired and came back and retired again. The NBA Finals which enjoyed the highest rating of all time was the 1998 series which featured the Jordan Bulls against the Utah Jazz. Jordan won the series with the famous, iconic isolation play (where he may or may not have fouled Byron Russell). And since that play, that has become the core of most team's offense in crunch time.

Look at the end of the Laker game against the Warriors. Kobe Bryant dribbled and dribbled through the defense until he had an opening to take the winning shot. Yes, he made it and the Lakers won their fifth straight game. But that's not basketball. Maybe his teammates aren't very good. But a professional basketball player ought to be given a chance to make the last shot.

Who really wants to see four grown men who are extremely well paid stand around and watch one guy dribble through a crowd? That's not worth the price of admission. That's junior high basketball. Or worse, the one bigger kid playing on the playground with his little brother and his friends.

Oden can save the NBA because he'll give a team a dimension no team has had in a long time, not even Miami - a true center. Shaq doesn't really count any more, as age and his bulk have limited his minutes and his effectiveness over the last few years of his career. He can only play with full on intensity for a few minutes at a time. And Duncan, Garnett and the rest of the big men in the NBA these days seem more comfortable away from the basket than in the post, or they might just as well be sold for spare parts (Dampier, Djiop, Kendrick Perkins, et al.) as paid to play basketball.

Oden has a combination of size and athletic ability that is inordinately rare, even in professional basketball where inordinate size and athletic ability are the rule rather than the exception. He can control the glass on both ends of the court. He can run with the break, which is almost funny, since no NBA team can really run a break anymore.

But what he really needs is a rival. That's the one thing that kept Shaq from being the best center of all time. He never had to work day in and day out to hone his skills to beat that one opponent worth beating. Am I the only one who stops to wonder what Bill Russell would have been like without Wilt Chamberlain? Or Chamberlain without Russell? Even Kareem had Cowens and Walton and Willis Reed and Wes Unseld among others hanging around when he was young. The only guy on the horizon that can be that rival for Oden is Hibbert, as I see it. His offense needs a bit of work, but he is a very good defender.

A player like Oden will give a team a low post option that opponents must respect, he'll draw double teams which will open space on the floor for shooters. Not that that's necessarily a good thing, what with the fact that even "good" shooters seem to have difficulty hitting the floor upon falling out of bed two days out of three these days. At least, with any luck, that might bring an end to the 1 one 5 superstar suicide charge that is the NBA equivalent of the four minute offense from NFL endgames.

For his sake, and for selfish reasons, I hope Oden doesn't come to the Celtics. Since this ownership group has steadfastly refused to terminate Ainge's employment, Oden could prolong his tenure in Boston indefinitely. For obvious reasons I don't want that to happen. But it won't be good for Oden, either.

Let him go to a team that isn't crippled by salary cap woes. Let him play for a team that doesn't have Brian "The Great Brain" Scalabrine as it's fifth highest paid player. After all, won't drafting Oden cast aspersions on the $4.48 million due to be paid to Kendrick Perkins. And above all, let him go to a team that isn't crippled with a superstar who is a selfish, petulant boy emperor who can't play a team sport with a team.

In the immortal words of Detective John McLane: "If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Quit being part of the problem." Paul Pierce isn't part of the solution. He can't share the spotlight. He couldn't with Ricky Davis, he couldn't with Antoine Walker. How in the world could Paul Pierce, the face of the Celtics, share the spotlight with a projected savior of the franchise. Pierce may or may not be one of the brightest minds in professional basketball, I wouldn't know, but he has to see that if the franchise has to be saved, in a sense, it has to be him from whom the team must be saved.

But it's all academic if the game within the game between Oden and Hibbert doesn't deliver. Any one of a million things could go wrong, one or both could get into foul trouble. Oden could eat Hibbert alive (metaphorically speaking, I hope), or vice-versa, which is infinitely less likely than the former. Or God forbid, one or the other could get hurt.

If this game doesn't live up to the hype, I think the NBA is in trouble. Then the future of the league is in the hands of Kevin Durant and OJ Mayo. And will those players make a team better. And I don't just mean wins and losses. Because what will the difference of 10 or 12 wins to the Celtics mean for next season? Will it make them a playoff team? More importantly, will it make them a worthy playoff team?

Whatever flaws it had (and it had a few), that 2001-2002 Eastern Conference Finalist had an energy and a chemistry that made it fun to watch. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a sporting event more than I enjoyed that monster comeback against New Jersey. Now put Oden or Durant on this Celtics team and tell me they'd be capable of something like that. I don't see it. It might make them a lower seed in the first round, and maybe they could be dangerous. But since the NBA went to a seven game format in round one, miracles have been outlawed.

Let Oden or Durant go to a team that can build around them from jump street. Let the Celtics take Joakim Noah and sink with the spare parts. Get rid of Ainge. Sell the team to an ownership group that won't preside over a poorly managed but expensive tax dodge, but actually try to build a champion. FYI, no one trying to build a champion would sign Brian Scalabrine to any kind of deal.

PS - Durant ought to come out for economic reasons, but he's less NBA ready than Oden. He's way to skinny to survive the NBA right now. He'll be knocked around until he can bulk up to withstand the punishment. Staying in school would help, since college teams aren't allowed to turn basketball into rugby as often as NBA teams do it. I think he's two years away at least from really contributing, maybe three if he has the misfortune to get hurt.