Tag: Danny Ainge

Danny Ainge gives updates on Gordon Hayward’s, Marcus Smart’s conditions

Danny Ainge appeared on local radio show Toucher and Rich to talk Gordon Hayward’s and Marcus Smart’s health.

To the relief of many, it seems Gordon Hayward’s foot soreness has little to do with the brutal injury he sustained at the start of the 2017-18 NBA season.

As one of four Boston Celtics out injured against the Dallas Mavericks Wednesday night, concern over injury is somewhat elevated among fans, particularly regarding anything that could knock a key player out of action for extended stretches.

So when news came Hayward was a late scratch to the eventual win, concern over whether the discomfort might be related to the Butler product’s catastrophic injury were forthcoming.

Today, however, on the popular local sports radio show Toucher and Rich, as team president Danny Ainge made his weekly appearance, the topic of injuries came up, and the former executive of the year explained both Hayward and Marcus Smart’s injury situation.

Smart had been dealing with eye infection along with two other players being out with more serious injury — centers Vincent Poirier with a broken finger and Robert Williams with a left hip edema — and Hayward’s malady began bothering him even before his hand was fully healed.

“Hayward, he’s day-to-day,” said the Oregon native.

“He’s had this foot issue — when he was coming back from the hand injury he was doing a lot of training and being able to work and he just has a toe/foot — it’s right there where your toe connects with your foot,” Ainge added.

“It’s just some pain, and we’re trying to figure out what it is. He had a cortisone shot, hoping that would make it better, but it actually made it worse. So, we’re trying to figure all that out, but nobody knows exactly what the issue is.”

Not exactly optimal news, given they still haven’t uncovered the source of the discomfort, but it’s unlikely to be a symptom of something going wrong with Hayward’s previously-injured ankle, at least directly.

They do seem to be leaning towards it being a minor issue, the main concern being that it is lingering. Ahead of last night’s tilt, head coach Brad Stevens related they’d tested several times already, and planned to again, just to be safe.

“They did an MRI three weeks ago, two weeks ago or whatever it was,” he said (courtesy of MassLive’s John Karalis). “Nothing structural, nothing a big concern … He’ll do another MRI tomorrow just to rule anything else out.”

Smart, on the other hand, may be back soon, though from the sound of what the team’s general manager had to say, it seems likely he won’t be suiting up on Friday against the Detroit Pistons.

“Smart had a bad case of an eye infection, but he’s getting much better,” offered Ainge. “He had a viral issue, and he was sick with the flu for four or five days through this whole process.”

“He was just quarantined at home, but he’s getting better. I talk to him every day, and I’m hoping that he’ll be healthy,” he added.

“He hasn’t played basketball or even been out of bed much over the last week to ten days. We need to get him back out on the court and sweating and making sure he’s healthy and doing good. I would venture to say Christmas, Christmas day would be the time for his return, but that’s just a guess.”

This sentiment was largely mirrored by Stevens ahead of the Mavericks game.

“Comparing [Smart] to Monday last week, he was doing at best equal and maybe a little bit worse, but I’ve heard he feels better as of last night,” said Stevens. “Today he’s gone back to see more people, and hopefully he’s able to get on the court soon. But no timeline on it.”

With just how banged up Marcus Smart tends to get mid-season, the eye infection may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, especially with the Celtics having weathered a tougher stretch of their schedule down multiple players.

With few teams ahead soon with a winning schedule, but plenty of back-to-backs, Boston’s best friend until February is rest. For at least the first half of the next month, the team will have several players getting it — whether they want it or not.

Anthony Davis scores most points in NBA history during first game against a former team

Nobody in NBA history has ever scored as many points as Anthony Davis just did while playing against their former team for the first time.

Nobody in NBA history has ever scored as many points as Anthony Davis just did while playing against their former team for the first time. Kevin Durant hung 39 on the Oklahoma City Thunder during his first matchup with his former team in 2016. Stephon Marbury dropped 39 on the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2000 the first time he played against the franchise he broke into the league with, and Danny Ainge scored 39 as well against the Boston Celtics in 1989. But during a hard-fought 114-110 victory over the New Orleans Pelicans, Davis went for a game-high 41.

While meeting the Pelicans for the first time since he requested a trade last year from the franchise he spent six seasons with, the Los Angeles Lakers big man was simply spectacular. Davis connected on 50% of his field-goal attempts while scoring 41 points to go along with nine rebounds. He combined with LeBron James to total 70 points on the evening between the two of them–which tied for the most points the superstar duo has scored in a game this year–and helped the Lakers to their 16th victory of the season.

The Lakers have now won nine-straight games which is tied with the Milwaukee Bucks for the longest active win-streak in the NBA. But improving to 16-2 overall wasn’t easy for Los Angeles. Despite 14 first quarter points from A.D., the Lakers trailed by double-digits early on. LeBron offered 16 of his 29 points in the fourth quarter, though, while Kyle Kuzma scored nine in the final period in support of a monster night from Davis to help L.A. rally for the victory.

As a note, during LeBron’s first game against his former Cleveland Cavaliers team as a member of the Miami Heat he scored 38 points. During his first game against Miami after returning to Cleveland James dropped 30, and last season with the Lakers he scored 32 against the Cavs the first time he played them. But he never gave his former team as many as the 41 points that Davis did on Friday the first time he met them as an opposing player and nobody else has either in the history of the sport.

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When it comes to cutting deals, ‘Trader’ Danny Ainge is a cut above the rest

When it comes to retaining and gaining All-Star production in trades, Boston Celtics president Danny Ainge is simply without equal.

Boston Celtics president and general manager Danny Ainge, nicknamed “Trader Dan,” has a reputation of robbing rival general managers blind when it comes to cutting deals but how does his shrewd reputation stack up against the evidence?

To start, you’d have to define what counts as evidence. How do we know who “won” a trade when so much of the chatter surrounding trade narratives tends to be neck-deep in recency bias, and shaped by opinions not always grounded in facts?

You could hold up titles won after trading for a player but, given they only hand out one of them per season, you wouldn’t have enough data points to get much of an idea. You could perhaps examine a team’s net rating but there’d be too many other factors to consider.

Judging the compared production of the players and assets trading sides in a deal runs into similar issues but HoopsHype’s Bryan Kalbrosky and Alberto de Roa put together a compelling argument for a simpler approach.

Using post-trade All-Star seasons by players dealt in both directions, HoopsHype assembled a data set of the team presidents and general managers who have gained (and lost) the most seasons of All-Star production in recent years, both on their current team, and any previous on which they held a similar position.

Unsurprisingly, Boston’s Ainge is far and away at the top of the list with 16 seasons of such play gained via trades. Half of that total comes from the deals that brought Hall of Fame talents Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to Boston in 2008, with five and three All-Star nods apiece, respectively.

Even more impressive is the fact that Ainge has not traded away a player with even one season of post-trade All-Star productivity.

With All-Star point guard Kemba Walker already having a massive impact on the team’s fortunes after being acquired in a sign-and-trade for Terry Rozier, we’ll almost certainly see the gulf between Ainge and his peers grow before Banner 18 finds its way into the rafters.

The worst executive when it comes to making trades with this evaluation method has been Oklahoma City Thunder general manager Sam Presti, who may not have had much of a choice in the bulk of those seasons, given reports of Thunder ownership being unwilling to pony up to pay shooting guard James Harden while Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook still starred in OKC.

Harden has had seven All-Star seasons to date following his trade to the Houston Rockets.

For Ainge, the closest competitor is the Portland Trail Blazers general manager Neil Olshey. Olshey has managed to bring on five seasons of All-Star production via trades (which pales in comparison to Ainge) and he did so without sending out any All-Star seasons in exchange, like Ainge.

While there are many other ways that team executives contribute to the success and failure of their respective clubs, like coaching hires, trades are one of the most common and important tools used in team-building.

Though not every franchise prioritizes championships the same way, winning matters to all of them, making All-Star production a fairly uniform metric to use across all 30 teams.

Despite their historic richness in banners over the decades, Boston has only put together one championship team during Ainge’s tenure. Though one would expect more of an executive who has amassed as many All-Stars as he has, it may be as much a testament to the difficulty of such a feat as much as anything else.

Nonetheless, should players from this iteration of the Celtics win it all over the next half-decade, it’s probably also fair to say a major part of any future championship will come from the players a team has drafted as well.

Does Danny Ainge deserve the blame for last season’s chaos?

Boston Celtics president Danny Ainge has a point.

After how poorly last season went for the Boston Celtics, along with a free agency decision that generated as much angst as any in recent years, Brooklyn Nets point guard Kyrie Irving has been cast as a villainous character despite the testimonies of former teammates coming to the mercurial star’s defense.

Of Irving’s many supporters in the league, two voices that have consistently sided with him have been in Boston long enough to be considered part of franchise lore.

Though there are certainly a couple of his former teammates who still seem to hold a grudge against him, Celtics guard Marcus Smart and team president Danny Ainge have went against the grain, opting to take a more holistic approach when analyzing the crux of Boston’s problem last season.

Even recently, as Ainge sat down with ESPN’s Rachel Nichols on Tuesday and discussed Irving’s departure, as well as revealing that he believes he was ultimately at fault for Boston’s woes last season.

“Kyrie for his first year and half was terrific for us,” says Ainge, “and I really was hopeful that it was going to be a good marriage going forward. But he really wanted to go home and that’s his choice.”

Still, while Irving was undeniably a catalyst for the divisiveness and tension in the team’s locker room, Ainge says that he “[doesn’t] know why he gets all the blame.”

“I’m the one who should be blamed for last year,” Ainge muses. “We put a team together that just didn’t have the pieces that fit. We had a lot of talent, a lot of expectations but it’s certainly not Kyrie’s fault.”

Pressed by Nichols, Ainge doubled-down on his surprising admission of guilt:

“I do think it was my fault. I think that in hindsight we should have cleaned out the roster a little bit to make it easier for [Celtics head coach] Brad [Stevens].

We had a deep roster [and] we were built for a longer run but we had a lot of young guys that had a lot of success without Gordon [Hayward] and Kyrie. The guys that had success without those two guys felt like it was their time for the spotlight and it just didn’t mesh.”

Whether that means Ainge should have moved Terry Rozier, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, Gordon Hayward or some combination of the four is unknown but the Celtics were definitely prepared to be spearheaded by Kyrie, and were reportedly ready to offer him a contract extension last fall.

With those players, acquiring Kawhi Leonard from the San Antonio Spurs or Anthony Davis from the New Orleans Pelicans would have been possible though they may have been better decisions for the short-term than long-term. Maybe.

That said, there’s little doubt that the multitude of individual goals was a major factor in the team’s locker room issues, or that the rise of Tatum, Brown and Rozier made it difficult for them to mesh with Irving and Hayward.

Not necessarily because there were too many mouths to feed on the court but because of the position overlaps between pairs like Irving and Rozier along with Brown and Hayward.

This season, Boston has been able to play Brown, Tatum and Hayward together in the starting lineup (alongside Kemba Walker) but Brown and Hayward haven’t spent much time on the court together due to injury.

That Walker is more passive as a scorer than Irving will likely ever be also aids the group in fitting together.

Ainge isn’t directly responsible for Irving’s self-serving statements, Rozier and Hayward’s often mediocre performances, or any of the other issues that emerged but he’s the one that shapes the roster. Last season, he failed to put a team together that clicked on or off the court.

His decisions have the largest impact on the team’s season and, as a result, he is at fault for how terrible of a season it was for Boston. However, like the players and coaches he’s defended, he’s not solely at fault either.

 

Celtics’ Danny Ainge is the master of trades in the NBA

There is no exact science to measuring the success of an NBA executive, though re-evaluating trades is common practice by basketball media.

There is no exact science to measuring the success of an NBA executive, though re-evaluating trades is common practice by basketball media.

As part of this, we looked at how many All-Stars seasons the traded players have had after the deal. The executive who did the best in this mark is Boston Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge and it’s not even close.

Ainge has had 16 seasons of All-Star campaigns from players he has traded for during his tenure with the Celtics. Perhaps most notable is that he landed Kevin Garnett (who was an All-Star five times with Boston) without giving up any in return. Ray Allen also made three All-Star teams and the Celtics surrendered none in return.

Even more impressive: none of the players he has traded has ever made an All-Star team after leaving the franchise. That also includes offering Isaiah Thomas (who made an All-Star team with Boston but has not since) in a deal for superstar guard Kyrie Irving.

The only other active executive in the NBA who has netted more than two All-Star seasons without giving up any is Portland Trail Blazers president of basketball operations and general manager Neil Olshey – who acquired Chris Paul while he was working for the Clippers.

Houston Rockets executive Daryl Morey has given up five All-Star seasons in exchange for seven. His trades have clearly been the most high-risk, high-reward of the executives around the league.

This study also looks at folks who were formerly executives for other teams (e.g. Mitch Kupchak with the Los Angeles Lakers as well as the Charlotte Hornets) before arriving at their current destination.

Overall, the basketball exec who fared the worst in this research was Sam Presti. This is mostly from trading James Harden, who has been an All-Star seven years in a row since getting moved to the Rockets. It also includes two All-Star nods from Victor Oladipo, who was acquired in exchange for Paul George.

HoopsHype’s Alberto de Roa contributed research to this report

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Danny Ainge not opposed to giving Kyrie Irving tribute video upon return

Should Kyrie Irving receive a tribute video when the Brooklyn Nets visit the Boston Celtics on Nov. 27.

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While seemingly everyone else in Boston will bring out the pitchforks for Kyrie Irving’s potential return to TD Garden on Nov. 27, don’t expect Boston Celtics president and general manager Danny Ainge to join in the mob mentality, opting for a more balanced view of Irving’s time with the franchise.

When asked by “The Toucher and Rich Show” hosts Fred Toettcher and Rich Shertenlieb about the possibility of giving Irving a tribute video — what has become a common gesture around the league for certain players upon their return to a former team — Ainge didn’t balk at the possibility.

“Sure… He gets blamed for a lot of the sour last year,” says Ainge (per Boston.com), “and I just think it’s much, much bigger than that. I don’t have any grudges against Kyrie.

For all the abrasiveness, detachment, disengagement and even selfishness that Irving displayed last year — issues that reared their ugly head in the locker room, in the media and on the court —the issue extended past Irving in that he was far from the only reason Boston fell short of expectations.

With Gordon Hayward’s return, there was a natural push-and-pull — or power struggle, if you will — that placed pressure on the core players to find a way to mesh and they were slow to, even needing both Hayward and Jaylen Brown to come off the bench so that Irving and Jayson Tatum could act as their 1-2 punch.

At this point, though the Celtics saw steady improvement from Hayward and Brown as they season progressed, there was already growing frustration on the part of Brown.

He’s recently admitted to being concerned about his lack of opportunity in 2018-19 with his contract extension approaching and being demoted to the bench, rather than suggesting he come off the bench like Hayward did, has a different effect on the psyche as well.

Speaking of Brown, his tiffs with Irving — whose opinions he openly questioned — further damaged the chemistry he was trying to salvage in an ironic sort of way.

Not to be forgotten, backup point guard Terry Rozier was struggling after playing like a high-level starter in the 2018 NBA Playoffs. As he would say during the season, he sacrificed more than any other player on the team, and while he kept his head down and stayed out of the headlines (for anything unrelated to his performance on the court) it’s obvious that he too was frustrated throughout the season.

That’s at least three of the team’s top six players (counting Tatum, Hayward, Marcus Smart) who were clearly frustrated with by their own situations, although there was interconnection.

If Irving revealing that he was grieving from the passing of his grandfather holds any weight, perhaps Boston’s inability to identify his behavior was out of character — particularly after having multiple players whose experienced losses to loved ones in recent years (Smart, Isaiah Thomas and Jae Crowder) — should also be explored.

As Ainge said, the issue was far more complex than the amalgamation of Irving’s character flaws causing Boston to miss the playoffs.

Though it was ugly off the court for the six-time All-Star last season and maybe even uglier against the Milwaukee Bucks in the postseason, Irving has had many positive moments that showed he may in fact be growing as a leader in his first season.

While more or less taking former backup Terry Rozier under his wing during the 2018 NBA Playoffs while he was out with a surgery to deal with a bacterial infection, he also developed a strong relationship with young forward Jayson Tatum which is important for players planning to be one of the league’s dynamic duos.

He was also coachable, adhering to Stevens’ wishes to put efforts into areas of his game that he had previously not been not a focus for him, like defense and facilitating, even recording a career-high in assists per game last season (6.9). That, if nothing else, is how good leaders can lead by example on the court.

Though Ainge is unsure if Irving will receive a tribute video, it would be a kind gesture from the Celtics that would help put to bed a relatively threadbare narrative. There would be plenty of highlights to pull together if so.

However, that’s only if Irving actually comes to Boston, whether he’s healthy enough to play or not.

Ainge is no doubt open to making a …

Ainge is no doubt open to making a move, and he has some good currency (a first round pick from Memphis, etc.) to use in the marketplace. But he made it clear he won’t upset what’s here now just to get any tall person. “It’s always about who,” he said. “It’s not, like, how tall they are. It’s not like you can just go find any 7-foot guy and put him out there and all of a sudden you’re going to be better. It depends on who that is and whether they’re better than Marcus Smart guarding the center.

Remember when the Boston Celtics made a …

Remember when the Boston Celtics made a serious push for Kevin Durant during the 2016 offseason? Apparently he wasn’t the only player who would have come to Boston in that scenario. Retired NBA guard Ray Allen, who spent five seasons in Boston from 2007 to 2012, admitted Thursday he spoke with Danny Ainge in 2016 and told the Celtics president of basketball operations he was open to re-joining the C’s if they landed Durant in free agency.