My hangwringing, and that of many other trade skeptics, was based on the idea that Brooklyn would convey in the top 3, or at worst in the top 5. If you'd told me that it would be #8, I think I'd have flipped to neutral or liking it.
Actually, his usage went up and his efficiency dropped. Outside of PPG, he played the same or worse in just about every category.
I wonder what that could be.
Dammit Trump, you had to go and start moving towards Korean peace and ruin my analogy. And the Scratch ticket will probably end up a bust.
I was on the record prior to the season saying that there would be a lot of tankers who would calibrate their end of the season records to be just under those of teams like Brooklyn. If I could make that guess, the Celtics definitely could do a lot better. Again, keep in mind that the Nets actually got somewhat unlucky with the Lin injury.
It's hard to blame Altman for the Irving situation, because his predecessor was the one that screwed this up (one of his very few mistakes, but unfortunately a hugely expensive one). If Griffin had talked to Irving last June before initiating trade talks with the Suns things would have gone differently, but then word about the deal leaked (probably from Phoenix's end, not sure what McDonough & Co. were thinking there, were they hoping that Irving would demand a trade to a lottery team for pennies on the dollar?) and all hell broke loose.
Prior to the season, Pelton had BRK as 4th worst winning 29.5 games, but given that PHO (30.3), NYK and IND (32), and ORL (32.2) were all pretty close and a good number of them were going to be playing for a better draft position, I don't think it took advanced metrics to figure out that BRK was unlikely to hit bottom again.
thanks it was dicey for a while in late march but they got hot and are now sat up for 5 years at least a lineup of Hoford C Tatum PF Hayward SF J Brown sg And Iring at pg with smart as the 6th man and morris at 7 means u are the only team in the nba that can stop GS for the next 3 years
I agree with that. I was referring to the praise Altman got for both deals, which seemed overblown at the time, and looks ridiculous in hindsight.
June is right around the corner and Instaface gave up his mea culpa.
went back through some old reports and Altman could have had Bledsoe, Bender, and MIA's pick this year for Irving. I still think that was a better deal for CLE.
Who knows but that definitely does sting. At least we didn’t pick Kevin Knox over Shai…
Your point is valid. Front office types always use hindsight to say who they’d take but I will say that Tatum over Fultz is a good data point that Ainge may not be full of shit on some of these.
In this case, all this does is make a bad trade look worse, so I’m not sure why Ainge (if he’s the source) would lie..
I mean SGA is literally the profile of guys that Ainge went gaga over in the lottery.
This is ignoring the fact that nearly everyone in the league felt that the 2018 draft was going to be one of the best ever. Because of that, the pick was far more valued than any other Celtic draft asset, and giving it up was the single biggest risk of the trade (with number 2 being Kyrie’s problematic personality). If it’s really true that Ainge would have picked SGA, that means the too concerns people had at the time turned out ended up being realized.
Actually the pick slipping to number 8 would have been seen as a surprise. At the time of the trade it was an unprotected number 1 pick for the worst team in the league for a draft that was seen as possibly the best ever. That pick had a ton of value..
Unless I'm missing something, this feels to me like Danny perhaps casually shared w Scal that SGA had been on their radar until they traded their pick -- not some covert intel divulged in a parking garage.
I've seen posters and writers criticize Ainge for "holding on" to his draft assets for too long. Yet when there was a clear case of using a draft asset to add a really good player, he's criticized for trading the pick. Kyrie was a risk, but similar things could have been said for a lot of star players that get traded. Obviously, knowing what we know now that risk was much higher than Ainge probably expected.
Right. But I can't picture Ainge projecting SGA -that- highly at the time the pick was traded, which is the point of this little discussion. The only way I can see Ainge picking SGA at #8 is if he was doing the projecting -after- the pick was already traded and around the time of the actual draft.
I'm not sure anyone is worked up over a misstep, not least because it's by no means clear that it was a misstep.
I think that’s what Scal was suggesting - though it’s hard to through second hand reports.
My daughter put her head face down on our bed for like 5 minutes when I broke the news to her.
I'm not sure how you conceive this as "a lateral move". Can't say I've ever heard a "win now" trade called that. The biggest asset the Cs gave up wasn't a player similar to KI but a highly valued draft pick that could have turned into something more valuable than what was received (i.e. KI). Arguably that's exactly what happened.
How is that irrelevant? A young SGA on a rookie contract is infinitely more valuable than an expensive, personality-disordered Kyrie on a two-year deal. I don't know how that is even arguable. And I'm mystified by the idea that "Ainge had no alternative" and the only other option was hoping "IT would return to his MVP-candidate levels". As it turns out, the better alternative was pretty, damn simple: doing nothing. That's always the better option than picking up a guy who arguably provided negative value for a draft pick that could have turned into a player with perennial All-Star potential.
Yeah, he wasn’t yet basketball’s answer to an unmedicated Kanye, but that doesn’t mean the personality issues were unknown to the league. In fact, there were teams who passed on trading for him for this very reason (most notably Phoenix) and those concerns were very much part of the discussion at the time.
The odds of that pick even at #1 or #2 being better than KI - who at that time a perennial All-Star and probably considered a borderline HOFers - was small. If DA figured that BRK, because they played hard and were well coached, would pull off enough wins that they would't be #1 or #2, then he probably factored that into the equation.
Your claim of "what happened" is solely through hindsight.
Except better than Marbury and with a championship ring already.
I will say the one thing Ainge did get right was choosing to let IT go when he did. That said, if he really knew that IT was about to fall off a cliff then he wouldn't have been worried much about IT's pending free agency. As we know now, IT after his hip injury was never going to land a contact of any significance. Either way you don't make a trade of this significance because you're afraid of a contract negotiation.
Again, other teams avoided Kyrie because of concerns about his personality and those teams were proven correct. Ainge overlooked those concerns and we know now that he shouldn't have. It's not 20/20 hindsight to blame someone for ignoring concerns other people had at the time of the trade.
As I remember it, Marbury was also a head case - so I find it a bit odd that he'd be seen as a positive point of comparison. And let's also remember that unlike the chronically middling Timberwolves, Kyrie was unhappy on a perennial championship contender, who had just raised a banner the year before the trade request. And again, it's hard to say "nobody knew how crazy" Kyrie was when there were teams who were concerned enough about those issues that they didn't pursue a trade for him.
Good point on IT. Some of Danny's best moves were the ones he avoided or didn't make.
I'll push back on this. I voted no on this poll back in the day because Kyrie believed the earth was flat, promoted that idea, and there were think pieces at the time about the effect it was having on kids. Add that to him asking out of what was objectively a good situation with LeBron and the Cavs and it was clear to me (and Phoenix as well) that this guy was not worth the investment.
