| Danny’s New Job Description Authored by Elrod Enchilada - October 8, 2007 - 7:42 pm
| Current Featured Columns | | Merry Christmas, Raptors Fans The Raptors might not be playing good basketball right now, but there are plenty of things for Toronto fans to be thankful for this holiday season.
A Melo Behind The SuperstarsCarmelo Anthony has never been one of the league's most efficient offensive players.
 |
Maynor Using Utah’s Resources
Eric Maynor is an increasingly rare four-year, small college rookie. He sat down with RealGM to discuss how his first few weeks of NBA life has gone and what he has learned from Deron Williams and Jerry Sloan.
|
 |
Why LeBron To The Clippers Makes Sense
LeBron James already plays for a perennial underdog in Cleveland, but moving to the Clippers would allow him to do so in a huge market and with a core that will immediately compete for championships while also having an encouraging long term outlook.
|
 |
‘Home-Heavy Schedule’ Brings Question Marks
The Heat have been plagued by inconsistencies, making it difficult to determine how good they really are this season.
|
|
More from RealGM's Columnists
|
| |
There have been dissidents, to be sure. For the last four years some have sniped that the team should play to win now, that playing to win down the road never pans out because down the road is always down the road, that in the long-run, as Keynes put it, we will all be dead. There was constant pressure on Danny from the fan base (and, one suspects, Paul Pierce and Doc Rivers) to parlay the youth into quality veterans so the Cs could return to respectability. Jim O’Brien quit in protest of Danny’s philosophy in 2004; he was from the “win now or die” school, even if you have no hope of winning a title and no future.
Danny always said he wanted to trade for veterans. He stated his job was simply to build up his talent pool so he would have attractive assets other teams would desire. The team he inherited in 2003 had precious few. Ainge wisely was in no hurry to make a deal where he gave up promising kids for veterans not quite good enough to make the team a contender. He had to avoid desperation and remain patient. Danny passed up deals of kids for Baron Davis and Allen Iverson over the past few years. Clearly, that was the wise course, because those deals probably would not have put the Cs in contender status, unlike the deals of 2007. Those deals would have been Jim O’Brien’s wet dream: a higher grade of mediocrity leading to an eventual collapse and another rebuilding project down the road.
By 2007 it was unclear if Danny really did want to pull the trigger and parlay youth for veterans. He seemed in love with his kids. And it was understandable: Danny had a real talent for locating players deep in the first round and into the second round. They were players, and, almost without exception, they were great kids. Even when the team was terrible, it was hard not to like the team. Fan support was astonishingly strong. The 2007 team that won a mere 24 games seemed like the 1986 Celtics in terms of team morale compared to the M.L. Carr 15 win monstrosity of 1997. That putrid team played the game as if each player had a dead person chained to his leg.
The impasse came this past summer, after the Cs lost in the lottery. The drop off from Durant and Oden to the no. 5 pick was like a leap into the Grand Canyon. Thos guys could be the type of once-every-decade superstars who go first or second-term all-NBA for a decade and lead teams to permanent contention and periodic titles. Jeff Green and Yi might be very fine players, among the best 25-30 in the game in their prime, but they were not close to the Oden-Durant zip code. So no kid was going to come in riding a white horse a la Bird in 1979 or Russell in 1956.
The problem Danny faced was two-fold.
First, the Cs star player Paul Pierce was about to turn 30 and realistically had two or three prime time years in front of him. The Cs did not look to be realistic contenders during that period. Even if Pierce did not demand a trade, it was near a point where the Cs either traded Pierce and went youth all the way (as Seattle and Minnesota did in 2007), or converted their youth into veterans to make a run. The uneasy balance of the first four Ainge years could no longer hold.
Second, by 2007 there were real limits to how much further the Ainge youth project could go. Every year the Cs added two or three or four interesting young prospects. Ainge was coming up with guys like Powe and Gomes in the second round and West and Allen and Perkins deep in the first round. The problem was that Ainge had stacked up an increasing number of players who deserved to play and needed to play to develop, but did not have a clear hierarchy beyond Pierce and Jefferson about who had separated from the pack. If Danny simply brought in two or three more promising rookies in 2007, the matter would simply get worse. Doc would have been looking at a 13 or 14 man rotation, and grousing would have been inevitable. The following year Danny would add two or three more kids and so on. This is no way to develop a team. Danny had to get off that treadmill.
The stars were also in alignment for the first time since Ainge arrived to make the proper deals. On the one hand, the Cs young players had developed enough to have much greater market value, in particular Al Jefferson. On the other hand, Seattle and Minnesota were at a similar point and had decided to go in the opposite direction, and trade their stars for youth. Ainge’s patience paid off.
The genius of the deals, as I have explained in other pieces, was that Danny was able to get a player in Garnett who clearly is good enough to be the best player on a championship team. That means the Cs can actually win a title. With all due respect to Paul, he is not good enough to be the best player on a championship team, nor, at this point in time, was Al Jefferson. But Paul is a fine number two guy. And then having Ray Allen is icing on the cake. Teams that have a third man as good as Ray Allen tend to win titles or contend; they are almost never out of contention. That is the burden Doc Rivers takes into this season as coach.
After four years of slavishly following our kids, many Cs fans, myself included, thought we overpaid in both deals. We paid more for Allen and Garnett than any other team in the league was in a position to offer. We had cleaned out our roster, given up three number one picks, for two guys, three if you include the pick that became Glen Davis. We could have and should have been able to get both guys for less. We rolled the dice on two aging superstars, and if this strategy does not produce a title by 2011 at the latest, we are back to where we were when Ainge took over the team in 2003. Ainge has put all his chips on one number. We loved these young players like our brothers or, for people my age, like our children.
As training camp has transpired for a week in Rome, the situation no longer looks as stark. This team still has talented youth. In fact if one were to rank order the kids on the Cs roster on draft day, it would have looked like this:
1. Al Jefferson
2. Rajon Rondo
3. 2007 no. 1 pick (Jeff Green or Yi)
4. Tony Allen
5. Kendrick Perkins
6. Delonte West
7. Ryan Gomes
8. Gerald Green
9. Leon Powe
10. Sebastian Telfair
I understand there can be debate over these rankings, especially 4 through 7. I put Tony at 4 because he proved last year he can be a quality starter if healthy, and we have to assume he is healthy. A healthy Tony is a superb NBA player. I put Perk at 5 because he is a starting caliber 5, albeit an average one at best, and 5s are hard to come by. See Foyle, Adonal or Thomas, Etan to get some sense of how underpaid Perk may well be. Delonte and Gomes both can start, and play their positions as well as Perk though each has limitations, but their positions are easier to fill.
Even after the deals, Ainge managed to keep no. 2, 4 and 5 on this list. No. 9 may well move up this list, too. And Ainge has added several promising prospects in Pruitt, Davis and maybe even Wallace. The fact is that except for Big Al, all the other guys we lost we could afford to lose; they are replaceable. (Unless Jeff Green or Yi becomes a hall-of-famer. My gut tells me that will not happen.)
Let’s face it, Danny will be adding talent every year; that is his special gift. What is different now is that these kids will not be getting much playing time nor should they. When they finally get on the floor it will be because they are good enough to help win games now, not because they need to play to help us win games a few years down the road. Everything has changed. This is how contending teams operate.
Danny’s job as GM now is two-fold. First, and most important, he has to assemble the parts to win a title now. As long as KG, Pierce and Ray Allen are in their prime that is the first order of business. If the Cs do not win a title in 2008, expect Danny to aggressively use both the MLE slot and the LLE slot to bring in veterans for a run next season. The days of hoping Gabe Pruitt or Big Baby Davis can fill key roles in the rotation as kids is over.
Second, Danny will continue to bring youth in to keep the team stocked in young talent. This team will always have young talent as long as Danny is at the helm. That is very promising.
The ultimate task as GM for Danny, as it was for Red, will be to strategize to find a superstar to replace KG as the top dog once KG’s game falls below superstar standards. That was always Red’s great genius: finding the Russells, Havliceks, Cowens, Birds, and ….ouch….Biases, who could be the best player on a championship team. Red usually managed to do it without having to go deep into the lottery. Those are the guys a championship team almost always has.
We have got one now thanks to Danny. And it is his job to make sure we never return to the Dark Ages of the past 15 years again. His job is to make sure “the swagger,” as Ray Allen and Mike Gorman have put it, is back to stay. |
