| Danny's Worst Moves Authored by Elrod Enchilada - May 27, 2007 - 8:34 pm
In the wake of the May 22 lottery disaster, scribes and pundits have taken another look at the Cs misfortunes in the 21 years since the day Len Bias died. Crippling injuries to several key players, the lottery dud of 1997, as well as the tragic death of Reggie Lewis in 1993 are all prima facie evidence of the new curse of the Celtics. After three decades of extraordinary good fortune, God is finally paying us back and balancing the ledger.
Another line of thinking has gone past mystical explanations and has argued that the Cs are responsible for their present state because of managerial incompetence. With regard to the reigns of ML Carr, Rick Pitino and Chris Wallace there is little debate. During those ten years the Cs routinely blew high draft picks, made hasty and ill-considered trades, and generally were run an incompetently as could be possible.
Merely reconsidering the stupidity of those years is enough to make any Cs fans skin crawl. Consider this list of horrors:
1. Cutting Ben Wallace in 1996. Ouch.
2. Trading Chauncey Billups for an overpaid and unwanted Kenny Anderson in Chauncey’s rookie season.
3. Trading the draft pick that would have become Shawn Marion for Vitaly Potapenko, another player no other team wanted, in 1999.
4. Bucking the general wisdom to take flyers on Kedrick Brown and Joseph Forte in the 2001 draft, rather than go with the more highly rated Richard Jefferson and Tony Parker, who played the same positions.
5. Trading Joe Johnson and a no. 1 pick for Rodney Rodgers and Tony Delk.
6. Trading for Vin Baker, a player no other team in the league would touch with a 500 foot pole, yet the Cs acted like they had just stolen Shaq from the Lakers.
The unifying thread for the four stupid trades was the desire of the Cs to immediate improve their fortunes, and a willingness to sacrifice any hope for the future – any hope to actual have the talent base to be a legitimate contender -- to be slightly better in the near term. These trades did not become bad after the passage of time; I criticized each and every one of them as they were being made. In particular, the Potapenko deal was rumored for a few days before it was completed. I remember those hours before the deal was announced feeling like I was in an airplane over the Atlantic when all its engines had died and I had 45 seconds until I met my maker. We are talking world-class stupidity.
Danny Ainge has made it clear that he will not make such blunders, though he is now under increasing pressure from the fans and pundits to make such a deal over this summer. We have to hope he will remain strong. I am not opposed to a deal involving our no. 1 pick or a talented kid, but it has to be done with an eye to making us legit contenders, not to satisfy those who simply want to win 48 games ASAP and get demolished in the second round of the playoffs. We need more talent still, and experience.
I have probably been Danny Ainge’s strongest defender, or among them. I believe he has had a coherent strategy to build up the talent level of the team and he has been willing to exercise the necessary patience. I believe, unlike Peter May, that the team he took over in 2003 had Paul Pierce and not much else. I think he has drafted brilliantly for the most part. I like the job he has done. Despite the dreadful record of the 06-07 Cs, I think their future is much brighter today than it was four years ago when he assumed control over the team’s fortunes. If we had won the lottery, I believe Danny has built a team that would be a 55-60 win team for the next dozen years and win many flags. That is why Tuesday was such a painful night.
This does not mean Danny has been flawless, or that he has not made huge mistakes. He has. I do not blame him for the four main criticisms made of him (aside from the Telfair deal I will get to below.) These are:
1. The first Antoine Walker deal to Dallas.
2. Signing Mark Blount to a six year extension.
3. The second Antoine Walker deal.
4. Trading Blount-Davis for Szczerbiak.
Let’s go through these:
1. As for the first Antoine deal, this is still a brilliant trade. Antoine was demanding a max or close-to-max extension and had to go. He was bellyaching about how he needed to get his deal done. Even Jim O’Brien wanted him gone. There was almost no market value for him in 2003 (he still had two years left on his deal). Danny found just about the only team that would take him. In exchange he got the pieces that led to the draft picks that delivered West, Allen and Rondo. I make that trade any day of the week. True, we were saddled with LaFrentz’s horrible deal. But recall that Raef played quite well for us in 04-05. It was the following year that his game became useless. I still like getting West, Allen and Rondo, possibly a quality backcourt for the next 7 years or so. And if Rondo and Allen play as well as they may, this deal would be remembered as one for the ages.
2. As for extending Blount, sure it was a huge mistake in retrospect. But at the time Blount was coming off a career year where he looked like a quality starting center. Based on the way he played in the second half of 2004, he was underpaid even at the full MLE level. Danny would have been taking a huge risk to let him walk and get nothing in return. And Blount had a reputation as a workaholic, so many assumed he would continue to improve. I was as surprised as everyone to see what a loser and what a schmuck Blount was, as he has mailed in his career since the day he signed that deal. This also opened the door to trading Mihm, which, as you will see, I count as one of Danny’s blunders.
3. Unbelievably, some, like the reporters in this morning’s Boston Globe, consider it a mistake to trade Antoine a second time, in the summer of 2005. This is absurd. Antoine had a decent year as a role player on the Heat’s title team in 2006. Great. But he has three more years on a deal paying him well above the MLE; he is arguably the worst player dollar-for-dollar in the league; and he is completely untradeable. If Danny had signed Antoine to this deal, the same reporters bashing Danny for letting Antoine go would be ripping him ten new ones for signing Antoine to such a stupid cap-killing contract. And, by the way, Antoine has yet to figure out that he sucks. He is demanding to start. Sure, you can start pal, along side Curtis Borchardt in the Philippines B League! If he were on the Cs today, it would be a nightmare for all concerned, except Antoine’s accountant.
4. The Minnesota deal does look like a clunker on paper. We gave up Davis and Blount and Banks and all we got back was an injured and overpaid Szczerbiak and the possibility of a no. 1 pick way down the road. The reason I don’t think this is a terrible trade is that I don’t think Danny could have done much better, and Blount was a cancer who had to go. The only alternative was to simply waive Blount and swallow the $30 million left on the deal. That may have been better, but Wyc was not going to bite on that so it was not an option for Danny. And Ricky simply was not in the team’s plans, so while it hurt to lose him in the near term, it was better to get those minutes in the hands of someone who they planned to have around for awhile. There is little evidence that anyone else in the league wanted Blount or Davis and it is obvious why: in the year and a half they have played big minutes next to Garnett in Minnesota, the Timberwolves have been dreadful. These guys are losers.
So what were Danny’s el crappo moves, then? What are his moves that we can understand, but we cannot justify?
1. The Mihm-Payton deal
2. The deal to bring Antoine Walker back to town
3. The Scalabrine signing
4. The Telfair deal
Let’s go through these.
1. In the summer of 2004, just after signing Blount, the Cs traded Chris Mihm to LA for Gary Payton. The idea was to have a point guard who could keep the team remotely competitive during the influx of youth. Danny even got a future no. 1 from the Lakers in the deal. The problem was that he later traded the no. 1 (see below) and he should have kept Mihm. Mihm played decently as a starting 5 for the Lakers the next two years and was relatively cheap. He could have generated more on the trade market. The Cs ended up losing Mihm, and then squandering the LA draft choice in the deal to get Walker. So after one season they had nothing to show for this trade, or the next, and Mihm was providing value to the Lakers. Dumb.
2. In the winter of 2005 the Cs traded the no. 1 pick they got in the Lakers deal to Atlanta to get Walker. At first it seemed like a very smart deal. The Cs get Antoine and he looked like he had reformed himself and could be a leader of a young team. A mid to low first rounder seemed like a fair price to pay. Unfortunately, the Cs realized by the playoffs that Antoine was Antoine and that if the Cs signed him to a long-term deal it would be at the expense of the salary cap and Big Al’s development. It was already clear by then that Big Al was a much better prospect than Antoine was a player. So bye-bye Antoine and bye-bye no. 1 pick. In retrospect Danny pulled a Pitino here and overpaid for Antoine. He should have held out to give the Hawks just two no. 2 picks instead and if they refused he should have walked away. Since we got this LA pick back from Phoenix (who got it from Atlanta in the Joe Johnson sign-and-trade) in the Rondo trade, in effect what we paid for Walker was Cleveland’s pick in the 2007 draft. That is too much; we could use that pick.
3. Sure Scalabrine’s contract is not huge, but the problem is its length: five years. Danny should have paid a bit more if he had to – say $3.5 million per year -- but only given him a two year deal with a team option for the third year. Then we could trade his sorry butt in a salary dump. As it is we are stuck with him for two more seasons before we can dump him. The weird thing here is that, again, this was Pitinoesque. It is not like any other team in the league was offering this guy a five year deal. Why did we? And if someone was, Danny should have let him go. Yes, he is a smart player, a great guy, a hard worker, loves dogs, sleeps on the wet spot, etc etc, but he is simply not worth anywhere near the money he is being paid anyway you slice it.
4. The rock bottom. Trading the 7th pick overall even in a weak draft for a player as limited as Telfair makes one wonder what exactly Danny was thinking. We know this: Danny could have traded the 7 pick – if he was obsessed with doing so – for Shane Battier or future no. 1 picks. He could have done a lot better. The fact that the deal allows him to trade LaFrentz for Ratliff and one less year than Raef’s contract is not enough to come anywhere near justifying this deal. Portland knew Telfair couldn’t play. Danny is smart. How did he miss this? It only took a few games to see that Telfair was small, not super fast or athletic, and lacking in point guard vision. Portland had no other takers; Danny should have demanded a future no. 1, not accept a future no. 2, or been willing to walk. Danny way overpaid, even on draft day. Now that the entire world has seen just how pathetic Telfair is, this ranks among the worst trades in team history. And if Roy and Foye and Gay have good careers, we will be reminded of this stupidity for the next decade. Just typing these words gets my blood boiling.
If we can generalize from the bad trades, it is this. In these deals Danny was not really competing with anyone yet he overpaid. He should have been willing to pay less or walk. Instead, for whatever reason, he acted desperate and he got burnt.
In the good deals, it was often just the opposite. In those cases Danny was the one who found the one (and maybe only) team, in the league willing to deal with him and got the best possible deal. In the good deals, Danny was the one getting the potential upside.
I addition, in the good deals Danny was thinking long-term and attempting to improve the overall talent level of the team. In the bad deals, Danny tended to think short-term and trying to improve the team immediately with less regard for down the road.
The moral of the story, to me, is clear: Danny needs to be very cautious before trading the no. 1 pick this year. We know there will be some great talents available at 5 and we know Danny has as good a talent for drafting as anyone. We also know that if he is trading with a sense of needing to boost the team in the near-term, there is a decent chance that we will make a crappy deal.
One final note: No GM is perfect. Everyone loves the Phoenix front office, but they signed Marcus Banks and failed to take Rajon Rondo. Even Red laid his share of eggs, like trading Paul Westphal or drafting Michael Smith. Danny says all the right things and we have to hope he has learned from his mistakes. My fear is that all the talk about the Cs needing to make the playoffs in 07-08 – coming ominously from Doc and management -- might push him to make a deal that could backfire. To be frank, it was GMs in desperate positions like these that Red feasted on for years. (See McHale, Kevin; Parish, Robert; Johnson, Dennis) Good thing Red isn’t the GM for another team today or he might be planning to chow down on an Ainge sandwich, and floss his teeth with Danny’s underpants.
Here is hoping we get the good Danny in the summer of 2007. Because this summer may well be Danny’s moment of truth. |
