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.