The league, out of pure jealousy and spite towards Red Auerbach and the Celtics, forced them to carry cap hits for Len Bias and Reggie Lewis even after their tragic deaths.

Bias’ death was the first of a dual tragedy for the Celtics. Reggie Lewis, who was drafted the next year (with the 22nd pick overall) to fill the void left by Bias, died of a heart attack in summer 1993. It was Lewis who would succeed Bird as captain.

Dave Gavitt, who will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame this year for his role as founder and first commissioner of the Big East Conference, saw the impact of Bias’ death when he joined the Celtics front office in 1990. It came into focus after Lewis died.

“With the salary cap in place, it was very hard to replace that kind of a void, and the league had no arrangements to give any kind of relief in that way,” Gavitt said. “The same thing occurred when I was there with Reggie Lewis, equally tragic.

“It had the same kind of ramifications to the team, and we appealed to the league for an exception, to replace a player who had died. They came out and [Phoenix Suns owner] Jerry Colangelo said, ‘Don’t take this personally; this is not about green, it’s about Red.’”

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“The bad break of it all was that the league never gave us a chance to recover from Reggie Lewis,” Red says now. “Forget about Bias – they never gave us a pick or anything to recover from that – but they could have given us (cap) money to use for Reggie. They made us carry his salary on our cap for three years. Three! Today, they changed (that rule). They realized how shabbily they treated us.” He sighs. “When you lose two All-Star players and get nothing back … just think about that. Go to New Jersey and take away Kidd and Van Horn. Where the hell would they be?”

Bitter? Hell, yeah. He’s still bitter. Red isn’t buying any of this “What goes around, comes around” bad luck crap.

“The league couldn’t wait to shove it to us,” he complains. “People don’t realize that we did a lot of things for the league over those years. (Former Boston owner) Walter Brown was the guy who pushed giving the two last-place finishers extra draft picks so they would be competitive (back in the mid-‘60s) … I told him, whenever the time comes when we need help from the league, they’ll bury us.”

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Instead of just providing an example? You can do both unilaterally.