Austin Ainge sheds light on Boston Celtics’ approach to 2020 NBA draft

The Boston Celtics have their work cut out for them in the 2020 NBA draft, but the team’s calm, collected approach looks poised to pay off.

You would expect Boston Celtics head of player personnel Austin Ainge would have looked a lot less composed than he did at Monday afternoon’s press conference to discuss the team’s 2020 draft plans, but the Celtics executive was calm and collected ahead of the most chaotic period of the NBA calendar.

And if you add in that nothing about the league calendar is normal given the pandemic pushing the offseason well into what would normally be the start of the regular season, and mix in the difficulty anti-COVID-19 protocols require of the pre-draft process, you might expect pandemonium to be the general state of affairs in most front offices.

Not for Ainge and the Celtics, however.

“The draft workout process is great for us; we love it,” he began.

“It helps to have guys in and put them in situations that we didn’t get to see in college,” Ainge related. “If a guy is not a great shooter, we have him shoot a lot. If a guy is not great at running pick-and-rolls, we put him in a lot of pick-and-rolls. If a guy, we’re worried about his closeouts, we put him in closeout drills.”

“These types of things are helpful to get a little more info and we weren’t able to do that this year,” added Ainge.

In a draft where they control three first-round and four total picks, what the Celtics end up doing on draft night may well set the tone for the rest of the league in the November 18th event — and possibly free agency as well.

Neither potential free agents Gordon Hayward and Enes Kanter can be traded without their permission on draft night now that we know their option dates will come after the 2020 draft.

But, it’s also not out of the question that a deal could be struck with their blessing to send them somewhere they’d prefer to end up if they decide to opt into the final seasons of their current deals.

With free agency set to begin at 6pm on the 20th, the choices Boston makes in the draft may give us clues about what the team thinks is going to happen, but not if Ainge maintains his planned draft strategy.

Asked if the potential of losing one of Hayward or Kanter might influence draft night decisions, the Cs exec played down the possibility.

“I think it would affect maybe some trade decisions more than draft decisions,” he suggested. “As they say, need is a bad evaluator.”

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