I'm fine giving up Brown, Hayward, Smart and all the picks but no to Tatum unless Davis signs an extension. Tatum should be pulled off the table if Davis is just going to be a rental. No Kyrie, no Davis, but still have Tatum in the fold i can live with that.
He's not going to sign an extension. Even if he commits verbally, he's not signing an extension. There's too much money to be made to do that.
That's fair. In that case, they can have everything they want other than Tatum or Ainge walks away. Trading Tatum for an AD that has no intention of staying past 1 season is ludicrous. If Ainge was not able to sell Kyrie on coming back, there's no way he will be able to convince AD to come back either. Ainge should just focus his efforts on trading for a point guard to replace Kyrie.
Trading anything involving good players or picks at all for a one year rental is insane. At least Toronto got Danny Green in the Kawhi trade.
Toronto probably will also get a title out of it, which seems like a pretty good return.
The thing I keep coming back to is this:
If you are genuinely a franchise that is all about winning titles at the expense of everything else, whenever you get a chance to add a MVP caliber talent, you have to do it if your team is not already a serious contender. You have to take the risk.
Even if it's just one year, that's one year of title contention. History says you probably don't compete for a title without a MVP caliber player on your roster. MVP caliber players are very rare and very difficult to acquire, regardless of how many quality assets you have.
So from that perspective it makes complete sense to be willing to risk everything to add a MVP type player, even for a single season. The downside isn't that scary to a "title or bust" team because there just isn't that big a difference between "fun and competitive team with lots of nice pieces" and "sparse roster left barren by trades for players who left after a year." Neither one is winning a title.
This AD trade saga is a true test of whether the Celtics actually believe in the idea that the only thing worth aiming for is a title.
If they don't want to pull the trigger on a deal, that tells you that they place at least some value on the idea of having a good foundation for building a sustainable, competitive team for the near future.