I know you’re either too hung over from the World Series or too cynical about the National Basketball Association to care, but the Boston Celtics open the regular season this Friday night against the Washington Wizards.

For those of you in the former category, the prospect of Red Sox ownership being greedy and/or stupid enough to sign Alex Rodriguez should sober you up by Friday. For those of you in the latter group, all I can do is remind you that it is never going to be 1986 again, but that doesn’t mean basketball isn’t ever going to be worth watching again, either.

Celtics fans haven’t just been in a championship drought since 1986. We’ve been subjected to some bad basketball. Not only losing basketball, but aesthetically unpleasant basketball. Even when the Celtics won, they looked bad doing it.

The Celtics are going to be good again. The off-season acquisitions of Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen assured that. But are they going to look good again? Are they going to be worth shelling out $85 for a ticket to the Garden or tolerating Tommy Heinsohn for 2 1/2 hours?

Well, first let’s consider the individual talents of the “GPA.” (Please, they are not the “Big Three.” There is and will always be only one “Big Three”). Garnett, Pierce and Allen have played in 22 All-Star Games among them, so clearly they can play the game at an elite level. The question going into this season, though, is whether they can play together at an elite level. The best player any of them has ever played with before is either Antoine Walker, Rashard Lewis, Glenn Robinson, Wally Szczerbiak or Sam Cassell. So this is kind of like putting Johnny Depp, Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe together to make a movie and realizing the best actor any of them had previously worked with was Ernest Borgnine. We just don’t know how they will mesh.

So far, they’ve all been saying the right things off the court and doing the right things on it. If you paid any attention during the preseason, and I honestly can’t blame you if you didn’t, it was clear that each was willing to defer to the others, eager to go to the hot hand or even try to get whoever might be struggling on the right track. They were perhaps a bit too deferential at times, passing up open shots, but that will subside as they get more comfortable with each other.

There have been two revelations for me in the preseason games that I saw. One was Allen’s ability to go to the hoop. I always had him as just a spot-up shooter who might occasionally blow by a defender streaking out to the 3-point line to get a hand in his face, but the guy can handle the ball and take it to the hoop with authority, though probably not with the authority he could prior to a couple of ankle surgeries. Still, this is very important. We know Pierce and Garnett can make defenses collapse on them. If Allen can do it, too, this is going to be an even tougher team to defend.

The other revelation has been KG’s passing. I knew he was one of the top passing big men in the league, but I didn’t ever think he was this good. He’s easily the best passing forward the Celtics have had since Bird, and as was the case with No. 33, Garnett’s passing is contagious. It only took a couple of times of him finding Kendrick Perkins on the other block for uncontested dunks for Perkins to start looking to return the favor. Not that Perkins will ever draw a double-team in his life, and he’ll never be confused with Bill Walton, but with the kind of ball movement the Celtics have shown, he’s going to have some opportunities to find an open man, and it’s good to know he’ll have his head up when those opportunities present themselves.

The Celtics had 34 assists in their exhibition finale against Cleveland. Thirty-four assists!! The last decent Celtics teams, the Pierce/Walker Cs, were far more likely to take 34 3-pointers in a game than get 34 assists in two games. It was like watching a Saturday morning pick-up game at the local gym, and it understandably turned off a lot of basketball fans in New England who were raised on Cousy, Russell, Havlicek, Bird and basketball the way it was meant to be played.

Again, those days aren’t coming back, but we’re a lot closer to them, and to watching real basketball, than we’ve been since Bird retired.

Obviously, there are questions about Perkins in the middle, Rajon Rondo at the point, the bench and Doc Rivers coaching abilities. I’m not saying this team is a lock for the Finals. But they’re not just going to be a collection of three big stars standing around waiting to get the ball or make each other look good. They’re going to play team basketball and they’re going to be more fun to watch than they’ve been in a long time. And as New England fans, could we really ask for much more right now without seeming greedy?