Ainge hasn't had the best 12 months of his career but anyone second guessing the Hayward signing is practicing revisionist history. Everyone was pumped when he signed here. Kyrie didn't work out but keeping IT wouldn't have worked out either.
And for everyone pointing at Kawhai and Toronto - if Durant and Thompson don't get hurt, Toronto doesn't beat GS.
I was steaming mad when it happened, I'm still steaming mad. And it wasn't just me who hated it at the time. I remember a Bill Simmons podcast during the 2017 off-season, I think, where he had Haralabos Voulgaris on. You know, the guy who made millions off of betting on NBA games. Bill was gushing over the new Celtics, and how they'll dominate the east for years to come, and how Tatum will turn into the next Kobe and so on. When asked for his thoughts, Voulgaris paused, laughed in his face and said something like "No, just no". He was ouright mocking him. So no, not everyone thought this was a good move. This could've been avoided.
A GM who gets cold feet when he has to cash in his assets is useless, regardless of how many small deals he wins. We had five years to prepare for Davis (or any other top player) becoming available, instead everything's going down the drain.
Who was the genius who thought it was a good idea to go for a nutcase like Kyrie Irving? It's one thing if fans on an internet message board can't see past stats and hype, nobody expects them to, but it's basically the whole job description for a GM to identify the correct players.
This whole "In Ainge we trust" mantra has become a tired and worn out shtick, repeated ad nauseum by the same people who deluded themselves into the most optimistic perspective possible every step along they way. Every little move we made was supposedly part of Ainge's masterplan, and we were winning them all, and winning, and winning, and winning.
Turns out, there's no tiger blood in our tank, and every small sideway move that we did win now rings hollow, and was probably never all that important to begin with.
The simple truth of the matter is this: every single GM of every floundering franchise in the league could theoretically get their team into the play-offs. Draft the safest choice, overpay in free agency, trade good draft picks for disgruntled B-level stars. Takes you...maybe two years. You can make the play-offs that way, but you're never going to win a championship.
There is no mystery here, and being able to put a mildly successful team on the floor is not what distinguishes a good from a bad GM.
Yet, that seems to be exactly how Danny handled what we used to call "our treasure trove of assets". There is exactly zero reason, aside from the aforementioned delusion, to trust Danny with another rebuild and believe this time things will be different.