The complete guide to questions Celtics fans should be asking right now
COMMENTARY
June 1980. Beta version of Twitter. Apoplectic Celtics fans, probably:
Joe Barry Carroll is a generational big with an impeccable work ethic! Robert Parish is lazy and doesn’t run the floor! Kevin McHale is a no-moves stiff with coat-hanger shoulders! Danny Ainge is the next Brooks Robinson!
Right, the beta version of Twitter featured more than 140 characters, obviously. I assume you know where I’m coming from on this, but then it’s not safe to assume anyone gets anything these days that requires context, perspective, and patience. So excuse me while I tomahawk-dunk the point:
The Celtics’ stunning blockbuster trade with the Sixers Saturday night in which Ainge – that one-time Blue Jays third baseman who decades later is the Celtics’ president of basketball operations and chief decision-maker – traded the rights to draft Washington guard Markelle Fultz No. 1 overall for the No. 3 pick and the Lakers’ protected first-rounder next year leaves us with a lot of questions and few immediate conclusions.
Oh, I know Twitter is full of immediate conclusions. I should clarify: I mean legitimate, rational, well-considered conclusions. So let’s ask a few questions, especially in regard to what might come next for the Celtics, and see what we can solve …
SHOULD THEY TRADE FOR PAUL GEORGE OR JIMMY BUTLER?
Well, they certainly won’t go for a similar price now. George used Father’s Day to let the Pacers know he’s their daddy, revealing a poorly kept secret that hurt nonetheless: He’s leaving the Pacers as a free agent after the ’18 season if they don’t trade him beforehand. The trade rumors have begun in earnest, and I think we see the end game here already. He’s going to get traded to the Cavs, and then George and LeBron James will take their talents to Hollywood after next season. Get ready to torch those No. 23 jerseys again, fickle Clevelanders.
I’m sure Ainge is one of the GM types who checked in with Pacers boss Kevin Pritchard Sunday. But he shouldn’t offer much. George seems like someone who would be more impressed by being a Kardashian prop than a piece on Brad Stevens’s coaching chessboard. Only picks originally owned by the Celtics should be in play here for a rental.
As for Butler … well, here’s a story. Much of the media seating at the Garden is on the ninth floor. In all the times I’ve been aboard its slow-moving elevator in recent years, I’ve seen two scenes that have made me laugh. The first was when Charles Barkley offered the attendant $5 to punch Kenny Smith in the mouth. The deal was not consummated.
The other was when a different attendant asked Tommy Heinsohn during one game or another this spring if the Celtics should trade for Butler. “Good player,’’ grumbled Tommy. “BUT I DON’T WANT HIM!’’
Good enough for me. I’d rather they sign Gordon Hayward anyway.
DO THEY HAVE ENOUGH TO ENTICE THE PELICANS TO START OVER?
Or to put it another way:
@GlobeChadFinn lets say for fun, that NO listens on Davis. How many/which of those 7 1st rounders are you willing to give?
— Adam Connolly (@adamsconnolly) June 19, 2017
If acquiring Anthony Davis ends up being the successful end-game in all of this, the NBA Executive of the Year award should be renamed the Danny.
I’m highly, highly, highly skeptical it’s possible – the misguided Pelicans aren’t going to abandon their wishful Hakeem Olajuwon/Ralph Sampson thing with Davis and DeMarcus Cousins just yet.
But the respected Ian Thomsen perked up my ears when he said on CSN Sunday night that the Celtics can initiate a “real conversation” on Davis now, suggesting that Ainge should pitch it to the Pelicans’ NFL-minded owners as their own version of the infamous Herschel Walker trade.
What would I give up? Start with the No. 3 this year, the Nets pick next year, the rights to the ’18 Lakers pick … and then kindly ask them what else they might want. The Brow is worth it.
WHAT DOES THE TRADE MEAN FOR THE CURRENT ROSTER?
There are so many potential outcomes and moving parts right now that it’s impossible to say. This might indicate, however, that Ainge and Brad Stevens are at least satisfied with their guard quartet of Isaiah Thomas, Marcus Smart, Avery Bradley, and Terry Rozier.
I hope this is the case, because it seemed to me Bradley would be the one most likely to be traded, and he’s the most well-rounded of the group. I want him on this team.
As much as management appreciates him, I’d presume Crowder is a certainty to be traded if Butler or Hayward come aboard. There’s a lot to admire about him, but he’s not the athlete he was before the ankle problems and isn’t a starter on a genuine contender.
WHAT DOES HISTORY TELL US ABOUT THIS TRADE?
There are some friendly ghosts here. I joke about the Joe Barry Carroll trade, and it looks obvious in hindsight to deal a player who wasn’t a max-effort guy for freakin’ McHale and the Chief, but it was considered to be semi-risky at the time.
JBC hadn’t been tagged Joe Barely Cares by Peter Vecsey yet, and he was considered a can’t-miss prospect by pretty much everyone … other than Red Auerbach, as we found out.
(In his story on the trade, Bob Ryan wrote that McHale was a “sturdy 6-11 banger in the Mitch Kupchak/Jack Sikma/Rick Robey mold” while quoting an anonymous GM who didn’t like Parish but said “guys have a way of turning around when they get in that Celtic green.” Another GM told him Carroll was the best center prospect in a decade. Parish was a No. 1 pick four years earlier.)
I’m not suggesting this trade will come close to being a similar prosecutable heist. But Red shunned conventional wisdom and trusted his own instincts and advisers. So does Ainge. And he’s already pulled off a few Auerbachian heists himself.
Speaking of Robey and those friendly ghosts, it was Sixers GM Bryan Colangelo’s father, Jerry, who acquired him from the Celtics for the Suns in 1983. All it cost him was Dennis Johnson.
WHAT ARE THE TWO FUNDAMENTAL UNKNOWNS THAT HOVER OVER ALL OF THIS?
Right – there are many more than two. We’ve already addressed more than two. But I’ve juggled a couple of very specific questions on my mind since news of this deal broke, and I’m not sure we’ll ever get an answer to one.
Who they really like with this pick, presuming they keep it.? And what is it that they don’t like about Fultz?
Maybe he was never their guy at all despite the outside consensus that he’s the obvious No.1. As I had forgotten but Jay King of MassLive.com was quick to point out, the night the Celtics won the lottery, Ainge made an immediate point to acknowledge several prospects that he had already seen several times, starting – but not ending – with Fultz.
“I saw [Lonzo] Ball play the same,’’ said Ainge. “And [Jayson] Tatum. And [Josh] Jackson,” Ainge said. “Yeah, I saw them all.”
So what did they see from Fultz that convinced them that there are other players in his stratosphere in this draft? Do they wonder about his shot? Is it is Washington team’s lousy record? (Let’s hope not. That’s not on him.) Did Brad Stevens get negative reports from his fifth-grade social studies teacher or something? I’m not sure we’ll ever know. Ainge is candid, but he’s not going to trash the kid.
I think they really do like Fultz as a prospect and person. It’s just that there is at least one other player, and probably more, that they like as much, and picking up another potential lottery pick next year was too much to resist.
The theory is that the target is Josh Jackson, but his shot is ugly and so is some of his personal history; he is a real risk. A Celtics source during the regular season told me Ainge loves Tatum, the polished freshman from Duke. And wouldn’t it be something if this was all a setup to get Lonzo Ball, the player who sure looked like the primo prize during much of his high-profile freshman season at UCLA.
WHY ARE SO MANY CELTICS FANS FRUSTRATED BY THIS TRADE?
Social-media and its warped signal-to-noise ratio isn’t just the barometer here. I’d say 90 percent of my email on the subject is anti-trade, including from correspondents I know to be reasonable.
I get it to some degree. There was a lot of fun to be found in having the top pick, especially after enduring cruelties of ping-pong balls past. Ainge himself said in the postmortem on the 2017 season that his team has a lot of good players and needs great ones. Fultz is projected by a wide consensus of NBA experts to be a great one, and the Celtics just traded him to the Sixers, a division rival with a roster full of young talent.
It’s all … unexpected. And that leads to backlash. But it amazes me in a lousy kind of way that Celtics fans don’t give Ainge the benefit of the doubt after all he’s done to transform this roster in the post New Big Three era. How did they get that No. 1 pick in the first place? Right, via one of his signature heists. He has more than a few, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he just duped another generation of Colangelos, Auerbach-style. One reader told me Red would be rolling over in his grave at this move. Nope. Take the DeLorean back to 1980 and realize it’s exactly the kind of thing he would do.
No, Ainge’s resume isn’t flawless. I still have no idea what he saw in J.R. Giddens. But every GM has misses – in the ‘80s alone, Red spent first-rounders on Michael Smith, Michael Young, Charles Bradley, and Darren Tillis. Drafting is hard, and context is always necessary. Bottom line, I’ll take a bold and audacious GM with a spectacular track record who trusts his own evaluations and doesn’t listen to dipsticks like us. That was Red. That is Ainge.
His patience should be lauded here, because it cannot be easy for him. It runs counter to his nature. “He’s the most impatient person I’ve met in my life,’’ Larry Bird told me with a laugh when I was writing an Ainge profile for the Globe magazine last fall. “He’s really disciplined in how he builds his team. But waiting drives him crazy.”
Celtics fans are the ones who are impatient, and there’s little consistency in what they want. Some complain he’s hoarding picks. He used the No. 3 overall pick last year on the super-promising Jaylen Brown when Buddy Hield and Kris Dunn seemed to be the desired options around here. Some wanted him to trade a bunch of the picks at the deadline for an established player – and I suspect there’s a strong overlap with fans that are mad he traded the same pick now, even if moving down two spots opens up more than a million dollars in cap room to sign an established player.
At a minimum, Ainge deserves the benefit of the doubt. In truth, he deserves much more than that. Executives with the guts and confidence to make unconventional trades – and consistently win them – are a blessing that should be appreciated. I know, you’re tired of hearing it from me. Maybe you’ll listen to this guy.
“There’s so much pressure now because you don’t want to lose a trade,’’ said Bird last year. “But I don’t think that way, and neither does Danny. And we’re right.”
