| Had Danny Stayed The Course: The Opportunity Cost Of Success Authored by Elrod Enchilada - January 2, 2008 - 12:09 pm
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Danny Ainge has gone from wearing the second-largest Dunce Cap in the NBA to becoming president-for-life of the NBA’s Mensa chapter.
This is all nonsense. For starters, Kevin McHale got the best possible deal for Garnett, and salvaged what he could from a difficult situation.
More important, Danny Ainge did not get something for nothing. He traded away considerable assets to get Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett. These were trades that would have been impossible for Ainge to do just a year or two ago. He gets credit for putting the Celtics in position to make the deals and return the team to contention in a way no other team was positioned to do.
Most important, and here is the kicker: had Danny not made the Allen and Garnett deals, the 2008 Boston Celtics would be a pretty good team, and possibly a contender within a year or two. It is not like the last four years Danny Ainge has been twiddling his thumbs.
Indeed, in the flush of the extraordinary start to this season it is difficult to recall that Danny Ainge assumed considerable risk in making these deals. If the Cs win a title or get to the finals a couple of times in the next three years, the Ainge deals will have been well worth it. But if the Cs do not win a flag, or get to the finals, in the current eras, the trades may not look so brilliant, the pleasure of the current team’s success notwithstanding. This will be especially true a few years down the road as the Cs begin to rebuild while the assets they traded are flowering elsewhere. It is not like the Celtics were going to be terrible forever had they never made the deals this summer.
Let me explain.
Back up to the summer of 2006. Because it was then that Danny began his maneuvering to get into position to make the Garnett deal. Let’s assume then that Danny kept his 2006 no. 1 pick and did not trade for Sebastian Telfair. Unless Danny had made this deal and converted LaFrentz into Ratliff with his soon-to-expire contract, it is unlikely the Garnett deal would have been possible. No small part of Danny’s motivation for the Portland deal was to get an expiring contract to parlay into a veteran. Assume, too, that Danny would have ended up with Brandon Roy for the 2006 lotto pick, as Portland did.
Assume also the Cs had a dreadful year in 2007 and that they ended up with the 5th pick overall. And assume that the Cs would have drafted Yi Jianlian, as Doc has already said the Cs planned to do if the Ray Allen trade had not gone down.
What would the core of the team look like today?
5 – Perkins…LaFrentz
4 – Jefferson…Yi…Powe…Scalabrine
3 – Pierce…Gomes…Green
2 – Roy…Allen…Szczerbiak
1 — Rondo…West…Pruitt
This does not account for any free agents that might have been signed in the 2007 off-season. For the sake of this discussion, assume there were none.
Imagine this 10-man rotation:
5 – Perkins
4 – Jefferson…Yi
3 – Pierce…Szczerbiak…Gomes
2 – Roy…Szczerbiak…Tony Allen
1 – Rondo…West
Deep bench: LaFrentz, Powe, Scalabrine, Green, Pruitt
Would this team win the 2008 NBA title? Not a chance. Would it be a 24-58 team, or a 34-48 team? Not a chance. Big Al and Roy are emerging this season already as guys who are going to be annual all-stars for the next eight-ten years. Rondo and Yi are very intriguing young players. Gomes, Perk and West are solid. A healthy Tony Allen is more than solid. This is a pretty good looking team. And this doesn’t factor in signing any LLE or MLE free agents in 2007 or 2008. Plus the Cs would have a full complement of draft choices to use or to trade, and the possibility of Minnesota’s no. 1 pick down the road. In the summer of 2009 it might be below the cap. Or, during the 08-09 season, when LaFrentz and Szczerbiak’s deals are about to expire, the Cs would be in position to get a quality veteran from a team wishing to rebuild.
In other words, had Danny not made the deals, the Celtics were not going to remain in the lottery, and would be positioned to become a pretty good team for quite some time.
This is probably a 45-50 win team in 07-08 and a 50 plus win team thereafter.
So am I saying the Cs should not have made the deals this summer? Heck no. Absolutely not. I am enjoying this season as much as anyone and appreciate how difficult it is to have a living breathing actual contender. Kevin Garnett has been a revelation and this team plays the game like the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra plays Beethoven. It is why I love this sport so much.
And after 15 years in the wilderness it was time to get back to elite status. Paul Pierce was running out of patience and Danny had to act decisively. (But let it be said that a surprisingly large percentage of Celtics fans were in love with the kids Danny had assembled and they demonstrated extraordinary patience over the past two years. Ticket sales and support for the team was also remarkably high. In my view, this is evidence of the sophistication of the fan base.)
I also think Danny has such skill as a GM that he, like Red, may have the rare talent rise to the extremely formidable challenge of somehow keeping the team in contention after the new Big Three have faded from their primes. It is Danny’s talent for locating talent in the bowels of the first round of the draft, even the second round, which breeds optimism for the years ahead. Even if Danny does not locate the next KG deep in the draft, he can accrue assets that he can parley into the next KG or PP. But that requires as much luck as skill, so it is not entirely in Danny’s hands. All Danny can do is put himself in the position to be lucky.
Keeping this team on top after KG, Pierce and Ray Allen have slipped or departed is going to be Danny’s great long-term challenge. (His short-term and most pressing challenge is to tweak the roster to make it as competitive as possible while the new Big Three are in their primes.) If he pulls it off, he will join Red and Jerry West as one of the all-time great GMs in basketball history. But what is crucial to note is that Danny has shifted his job description from “building a contender” to “maintaining a contender.” That is a much better job to have; only a handful of GMs in the league enjoy that status today, the rest are desperate to get there. It is an easier and far more enjoyable perch to work from.
So give Danny his due: he is not like some drunk who bought a winning lottery ticket in July 2007 and now acts like he is an entrepreneurial genius who invented the personal computer. He is not Paul Allen, Ringo Starr or Jed Clampett. The team Danny had been building before the summer of 2007 was not chopped liver. It may not have been a champion, but it was probably going to be very good for a long time. And that is why he was able to trade those assets to get Allen and especially Garnett; that is the opportunity cost of our present success. |
