One thing stop throwing the Perk trade for the case DA is a bad GM argument. Right now Green is better than Perk.
the reason I remain angry about the Perk trade is the fact that Danny destroyed that team's chemistry and identity and cost us a great shot at #18 that year.
many people on this board simply don't understand the game well enough to know that stats are not everything.
TP. Probably the most insightful post I've read here. There's no other way to sum it up. /thread, pack it in.
Other key points to take away: McHale handed Ainge KG/championship; Rondo and Perk were great draft selections in that they were paired with 3 HOFers (major reason Bradley developed as he did too), a great coach, and the best "culture" in the NBA at the time; Ray left because Ainge dangled them all at every trade deadline; if the first two points are true (which they are), Ainge has done NOTHING for this organization in his tenure.
Edit, I'll finish: We won a long-awaited championship when Ainge was here. Yay. We should've won more. But I won't argue that, we did... so if that is the basis upon which we are judging him, and we want to celebrate that aspect, we can simply say Ainge/McHale gave us a good run.
Ainge has done nothing?
He pulled off the trade that brought Ray and KG to Boston, which won us the title. You think Rondo and Perk were the reasons for us winning #17? There were several times during the playoffs Rondo had to get benched due to problems handling the ball, lack of jump shot and poor decision making. Perkins at the time was far from imposing. Those two guys realistically were not starting calibre players in 08, but they were 'enough' because Boston had the big three who carried them through.
From 09 onwards, that's when Rondo and Perk started to really become productive...and from that time onwards we never won a title.
Next, Danny's Perkins trade was the very reason why this team has any future at all right now. Along Rondo, Green is the only hope of this franchise moving forward. The last 25-30 games of the regular season Jeff proved he can be a 20 PPG scorer when given the opportunity, and if he can continue to do that he will become the primary scorer we can build around - the next Paul Pierce if you will. Without Green our future would be based around a 6'2" defensive guy who can't play PG and a 6'9" PF coming off back surgery.
Speaking of which, Danny's drafting of Avery Bradley and Jared Sullinger - would you call those bad drafts? Bradley at 22 is already an All-Defensive teamer and Sullinger (while not an All-Star) well outplayed his draft position.
The Big Baby trade for Brandon Bass was a key component to us making it to the ECF last season. The fact that Danny almost got David West (in a season where we had ZERO signing power) was a revelation.
The ability of Danny to pull in Jason Terry and Courtney Lee last season based on the pure nothing we had to work with was, again, a revelation. How was he to know that Terry would struggle a little and Courtney Lee would suddenly turn useless?
The fact of the matter is that as much as everybody gets down on both Doc and Danny, they have done an amazing job. This team has gone through more major injuries than anybody else in the league bar maybe Portland, yet every single season Doc and Danny have found a way to make this team competitive and take them to the playoffs. If not for injuries to KG and Perkins at critical times the C's would almost certainly have Banner #19 by now, possibly even #20.
For those who are mocking Danny, I would love to see you step into his shoes last season and, using the resources we had (vet mins, mini-MLE and BIA) build a team that would make the ECF.
Likewise I'd like to see you step into Danny's shoes prior to this season when all we had was a MLE and try to bring in somebody better than Terry and Lee - who were both highly coveted at the time by teams with far more resources on offer.
Injuries have been to blame for our lack of success every season since 2008. It sounds like a bail-out excuse, but unfortuantely it's the truth. When you have guys like Kevin Garnett, Kendrick Perkins, Jeff Green, Shaq, Jermaine Oneal, Rajon Rondo and Jared Sullinger being lost for entire seasons...it's hard to win a title. Are you really going to say it's Danny's fault that these injuries happened? Does he have any control over this?
There was only one season so far where this team legitimately looked not good enough to compete, even when healthy, and that was last season. Even then it's hard to say that, because we never truly were healthy. Initially we had AB out and Green + Wilcox were recovering from Heart surgery. When AB came back Rondo went down, then Sully went down, then Barbosa went down. Who knows how good we could have been by the end of the season once the chemistry started to come through.