Once again this week, we witnessed first-hand the tangible value of teamwork.

We're specifically referring to Tuesday's ceremony for the new IBM Green Data Center (GDC), but let's throw in a quick shout-out to another green team - the NBA champion Boston Celtics.

Any one of the Celtics' "Big Three" superstars -Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett or Ray Allen - could have hogged the ball or racked up stats all series long.

Instead, they played tenacious "D," set bone-crunching picks, made the extra pass - and won their first NBA rings. All Three had been top scorers for mediocre teams in past seasons, so ask them the next time you see them -would they rather have the stats or the championship hardware?

And for those who won't run into the Three anytime soon, they sure looked ecstatic Tuesday night on TV.

Now, back to IBM. We're not going to claim that GDCs will save the world, especially since the billions of computer users around the world are using zillions of watts of electricity. We want our YouTube and MySpace and instant access to everything in the world you could possibly imagine, and IBM is just one of many firms involved in satisfying our demand.

But Big Blue's "Project Big Green" team really could have opened a case of victory champagne Tuesday morning, even if it's generally not cool to drink before noon.

Just from the sheer environmental perspective, the GDC is about twice as energy-efficient as the industry average for data centers.

The building design allows IBM to tap into Boulder's natural climate for free non-electrical cooling. IBM will use virtualization technology to reduce the need for energy-intensive hardware, and it's already one of the largest buyers of Xcel Energy wind power around.

On top of that, IBM's decisions to retain almost all of its existing building shell and to send about 65 percent of the old interior to recycling centers might help the GDC win LEED certification.

So, like the Celtics players, IBM employees deserve plenty of credit for a job well done.

But there are other components, such as leadership. When Pierce fell to the floor in Game 1, and everybody silently thought "knee surgery," Celtics coach Doc Rivers whipped his horses away from surrender. In the huddle, he screamed "Nothing's going to stop us now," and expressed faith in his other players - whether he truly believed it or not.

We're not sure if things ever got so dramatic at IBM, but there certainly was leadership from the top. The company devoted a cool billion last year towards "Project Big Green," an energy-efficiency effort that has helped clients save natural-resource-burning electricity and money, and IBM has been working on developing energy-efficient hardware for years.

After leadership and corporate performance, success can depend on support from the local community. This goes for sports as well -and sports junkies know that the Celtics franchise has had near-mythical fan support through the decades.

In Boulder, Chamber of Commerce members worked with engineers in the 1950s to study the land where IBM currently sits, before they even knew Big Blue would locate here. Locals pitched in to buy land for the National Bureau of Standards, now NIST, and Boulder residents helped pay for the original establishment of CU. All three projects paid off in spades, or at least in jobs and economic impact.

And in modern times, the State of Colorado allocated $632,000 for the GDC, and the City of Boulder granted IBM a $100,000 tax rebate. Now, the GDC was a $350 million project, so the public money was sort of a big drop in the bucket, but it showed that the city and state were interested in keeping this crown jewel project from winding up elsewhere.

And let's give some credit to the locals who didn't directly work on the project. It hasn't been that long since "carbon footprints" and energy efficiency were fringe concerns, but Boulder is full of activists, politicians and scientists who helped move both issues into the mainstream.

This editorial, then, might sound like a pitch for collectivism, but that's not quite right. Successful teams, to use a technical term, still have to be able to "bring it."

It's one thing to have opinions about saving energy, and quite another for IBM engineers to be able to develop state-of-the-art storage virtualization technology. And while our leprechaun hats are off to the Celtics' teamwork, the players all had to endure grueling training and develop their individual games to make the teamwork work.

So, we'd say that there's a yin-yang quality to success. You need the aggressive, unrelenting individual drive, as well as the selfless, supportive team-oriented collaboration.

And that's whether you're part of Big Green, Big Blue or the Big Three.