Bill Simmons on the Celtics, Thunder

[Jon]

Minus the Perk business, we were singing the same swan song last year around this time and we almost won it all. 

Much, much more importantly, the notion that we "overachieved" is largely ridiculous.  It's called, WE HAD SHAQ and now we don't. 

Let's see what happens when/if Perk and JO play 15-20 mpg each.  There was no Shaq vs. Chicago and too little JO.  I'm not saying that it would've won us the game, but it certainly wouldn't have been the beat down.  And if we had narrowly lost, I don't think anyone would've been this upset. 

[BballTim]

  I'm pretty sure someone on espn said they surveyed all the nba gms on the draft and Ainge was the only one who said Durant, but I'm not going to try and dig up a 5 year old article to find it.

IIRC, I there were numberous "unnamed lockerroom sources" that said Danny was high on Durant. But Doc saying flat out 'we were oden guys' kind of sealed it for me. 

  It was well known Danny was high on Durant, but we'll never know either way, so agree to disagree. It doesn't really affect the main point, that Danny had the team in good position to succeed whether they won or lost the lottery.

What the original point was, though, is that if we'd won the lottery, that Ratliff / Raef trade would have looked a lot worse.  Pierce was already talking about how he didn't want to be part of rebuilding, and I think it's much more likely that Danny would have traded Pierce than that he would have traded for KG.  Remember, Garnett was balking at joining Pierce in Boston prior to us landing Ray.  In other words, we can't just say that we would have had a team that included Pierce, KG, and Durant, or Pierce, KG, and Oden, because it's very unlikely that that would have happened.  What we would have had, though, was Big Al + Durant, or Big Al + Oden, and in those circumstances Rudy Gay or Brandon Roy would have been a lot more valuable than Theo Ratliff's expiring contract.

  It might be somewhat unlikely that it would have happened, clearly not highly unlikely. If landing Ray caused KG to change his mind, landing Durant or Oden might have done the same. If not, Presti would have probably been happier trading Ray for Theo than for Wally with a longer contract. If neither of those worked out we probably could have outbid the Lakers for Gasol. With the best expiring contract in the league and a pile of young assets it's silly to claim that we'd have been unable to land *any* of the major players traded that year.