Easy answer = money.
The "Fox News" answer = Ray and Paul Pierce are old and cannot play all these minutes.
The Truth = Danny Ainge made a HUGE error in judgement and got spooked by the trade deadline.
I am hoping this teams wakes up, but it really looks like the Perkins trade will go down as one of the worst trades in the history of Boston sports. Celtics gave up a championship to save a few $$$$. Sad.
Green and Krstic not doing as well as we thought they would sucks, but how does it mean Danny got "spooked" by the trade deadline? It was a good trade to me on paper, and for a while it looked to be working for a while. Then, both Green and Krstic simmered down.
Still, I do wonder if the Celtics are just coasting till next Sunday (when supposedly Game 1 for them is).
I don't buy that they're "coasting." This game basically decided homecourt if we match up against Miami in the playoffs. For all intents and purposes, it *was* a playoff game, or should have been viewed as such. Same as the Chicago game. I hope that I'm wrong, but I think the issues they're facing now are structural.
The only hope really is if Rondo starts playing out of his mind again, for all of his flaws when the kid's on we can beat anybody.
I've thought way too much about that [dang] trade. I'm not sure that Danny panicked. I think he talked himself into something he shouldn't have. I think he talked himself into Shaq and JO both likely being available for the playoffs, and that if so, Perk was somewhat expendable.
Now, even when we signed these guys over the summer, I think most of us were just hoping that ONE of the two would be healthy at any given time, so to me it's absolutely ridiculous that we would be trading the one guy who was most likely to be at least 85% - 90% by the playoffs. Perk did have his own injury issues, but he was playing and was always more likely to be available in May/June than either of The Brothers O'Neil.
Once Danny talked himself into the O'Neils being healthy, he saw Jeff Green as a young talent that could bridge the gap. He'd fill in the immediate need for a Pierce backup and be Pierce's long-term successor. I think he seriously overestimated Green's abilities; I mean, every NBA commentator was killing the trade at the time... and they've basically been proven right. Jeff Green could score mostly because he was on the floor a lot, but doesn't do much of anything exceptionally well and tends to disappear.
Still, Danny expected the O'Neils to be back (a horribly flawed assumption), and viewed the trade as a chance to REALLY make a splash for the future.
MUCH safer would have been to do what I think a lot of us wanted him to do at the time - a small deal for an Anthony Parker-type, maybe a Dahntay Jones, someone who could give us 10 or 15 decent minutes and not cost us any playoff-rotation players to acquire. Would have been a much lower risk acquisition.