Poll: If C's win title, does that make Danny right about not trading youth?

[Moranis]

Without knowing any of the actual trades it is hard to say.  It was rumored at one point we could have had Paul George without trading Brown or Tatum. 

As I've consistently said the biggest critique I had of Ainge was his inability to pick a direction.  He tried to win now and build for the future at the same time and he hurt both paths.  Why acquire Irving, if you aren't going to pull the trigger on trades to build around him?  If he wasn't going to do what it took to build around Irving he never should have acquired him and should have kept the assets.  Why bring in Walker, who clearly was on a different timeline than Taum and Brown? And on and on. 

[jambr380]

Other than a couple of mid-round draft choices, Danny was almost always right. The biggest thing went wrong during his tenure is that Hayward had a catastrophic injury. If that hadn't happened, who knows what direction our franchise would have gone in? He also waited his whole life to trade for AD, who basically told him to f- off, so he did actually try to trade younger players. Signing Kemba wasn't that egregious - he was coming off an All-NBA season and he had just turned 30. If Hayward doesn't get injured in the bubble, we may be talking about the 2020 NBA Championship Celtics.

If the Cs win a Title this season, he deserves all the credit in the world. He constructed this roster.

[Big333223]

My gripe with Ainge was the opposite. He managed to get Tatum and Brown and then kept trying to hedge his bets, rather than put all his chips in with building around them.

Agree.

And I don't think a title vindicates Ainge at all. This wasn't his plan, that was a Irving/Hayward/Horford/Anthony Davis superteam. And then Hayward broke his ankle and everything changed. The Jays are the contingency plan.

I don't understand this take. Signing Horford in '16 and then signing Hayward and trading for Kyrie and Morris in '17 was definitely Ainge going all in. If that team stayed healthy, they might have won the championship.

I think we overlook that when the Brooklyn trade happened, the Celtics weren't supposed to be competitive again for a while. But Isaiah and Brad had other ideas. Their success made the moves made in the summer of '17 make sense and accelerated the timeline.

Realistically, though, this team shouldn't have been competitive again until maybe last year. We're spoiled to feel like anything less than a championship is mediocrity.