Sunday Shootaround

BOSTON -- In years past, when the Celtics were contenders, the team would host a small draft night gathering for reporters. Players would be picked, execs would amble in and out and everyone would file stories about some late first-rounder who might become a rotation player someday. When they were no longer contenders, the Celtics began to do as other rebuilding franchises have done, which is to turn draft night into a party. It would be a chance to celebrate the birth of a new day and the dawn of a new era.

That's how we all wound up along the waterfront in the city’s revitalized harbor area at the Seaport Hotel, a fitting backdrop for what appeared to be a dramatic overhaul. There was an air of excitement at the festivities, spurred on by a flurry of rumors that all seemed to circle back to the Celtics in one fashion or another. Some made sense, others were more outlandish, but all pointed in the same direction: the C’s were trying to move up, they were going to get creative, they were going to be ACTIVE.

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Team president Danny Ainge came to the party loaded with draft picks. He had four of them in this year’s draft alone, along with a host of future goodies including unprotected picks from the Nets and more on the way from the Mavericks and Grizzlies. Two days before the draft, Ainge all but confirmed that his plan was to move up and that the team wouldn’t be keeping all of its picks on Thursday night.

And so it came as a colossal letdown when he was rebuffed while in pursuit of a player. That prospect was later revealed to be Duke’s Justise Winslow, who slid all the way down to the 10th pick where Ainge’s longtime nemesis Pat Riley happily scooped him up. It’s not that Ainge didn’t try, especially with the Charlotte Hornets who chose one spot ahead of Miami and turned down a king’s ransom of future choices to take Frank Kaminsky.

Thus began a long night of unfortunate circumstances. The Heat finished a mere game behind Brooklyn and three behind Boston for one of the final playoff spots in the East. That temporary disappointment resulted in moving up from 15 or 16 in the draft to 10, and yielded a better long-term outcome than a quick first-round exit.

"Maybe we were going too hard at it," Ainge said later. "There was a time when I thought, ‘Woah, this is getting a little out of control.’ We’re putting a lot of eggs in one young player’s basket. So, I’m not frustrated. In the long run, maybe it’ll be for the best."

Maybe it will. Trading up with that much on the table is a huge gamble and not often a productive one. Draft day is quick and chaotic. Emotions get involved, people fall in love with players and what seems logical in the cool light of the next day gets overrun in the moment. Maybe Winslow will be good but not great. Maybe the picks that didn’t get traded will become something more significant in the future. Outside of the top few choices, the draft is one of the more haphazard ways to build a team from scratch.

Still, that’s not the solace that fans were looking for when expectations had reached such a frenzied pitch. Especially not after Ainge surprised just about everyone by taking Louisville point guard Terry Rozier with the 16th pick. The reaction to the pick at the party was a resounding ¯\(ツ)/¯.

But the Celtics loved Rozier’s speed and his work ethic. They loved his toughness and tenacity. They believe his shooting will continue to develop. They had him for a second workout just prior to the draft and decided he was the best player left on their board.

"He’s really athletic and he’s really tough," Ainge said. "I love those kind of guys. Our team will love him, I think our fans will love him. I think he has a great upside as a two-way player. He’ll live in the paint. He can get where he needs to get. He’s got great speed, athleticism, length and he’s a terrific defender."

Rozier may turn out to be a splendid choice, and fans’ anger was sated somewhat by snagging R.J. Hunter later in the first round and LSU forward Jordan Mickey early in the second. Hunter is a long, rangy shooter capable of coming off pindowns and knocking down jumpers, a skill that was in short supply last season. Mickey is an athletic shot-blocker, another glaring hole in last year’s roster. Ainge added another long-range prospect later in the second round in Marcus Thornton, a guard from William & Mary who needs polish but is an athletic freak and can shoot. He’s likely to develop overseas.

It’s an interesting collection of players, but it wasn’t lost on many people that Ainge’s first-round choices looked an awful lot like last year’s picks of Marcus Smart and James Young. The Celtics now have nine guards including five recent first-rounders in addition to Evan Turner and Isaiah Thomas, and Ainge acknowledged there probably wasn’t room for all of them.

"Obviously we have a lot of guards and we’ll figure it out," he said. "I like them all. We might have to make some tough choices, but we really like all the guys."

It helps that the Celtics have one of the most creative coaches in the league in Brad Stevens, who figured out a way to cobble together a 40-win team out of a random roster that included 22 different players last season. Stevens isn’t a traditionalist in any sense, preferring skill and versatility over standard positional size in most lineup combinations. Positions are overrated, anyway. Is Smart really a point guard? Is anyone on the roster besides Phil Pressey?

"Everybody starts with ones, twos, threes, fours and fives when they’re looking at a basketball team," Stevens said. "I look at ball handlers, wings, swings and bigs. I’ve only got four categories. The more guys that can play the more positions the better. Right now when you look at our roster, I think we’ve got the three of the four categories with a lot of depth. That swing area where you can go three, four and play that way, that’s the area we’re going to have to address as we move into the next few weeks."

Rosters aren’t built in a night and even the quickest rebuilding projects take time, but we’re now into Year 3 of Ainge’s effort and there are real questions about where he goes from here. No one questions that Ainge nailed the first part of the process, trading veterans for picks and affordable players with untapped potential. The next part is much harder to pull off, especially for a team that is now stuck somewhere in the middle of the NBA landscape.

There are two other avenues for Ainge to explore this summer: free agency and trades. The Celtics have cap space for the first time in 20 years, which lends itself to a classic chicken-and-egg conundrum. They’ve never been a player in free agency because they haven’t had the cap flexibility, but Boston hasn’t exactly been a destination market either. Until they land a prized free agent there will be doubts about their ability to do so. The possibility of Kevin Love looms, but there will be stiff competition.

The trade market has historically been a much stronger play for most teams. Consider a list of the top 20 or so players in the league. Almost all of them arrived at their current franchises through the draft or a blockbuster trade. Only a handful of elite players have changed teams in free agency. LeBron James, Chris Bosh and Dwight Howard come to mind, and Howard was traded before he hit free agency.

The question for Ainge is whether he has enough to land a prized dissident along the lines of a DeMarcus Cousins. (The other question is whether Boogie is even available, at all.) The draft vault is stocked, but dependent on a team like Brooklyn bottoming out. The roster is full of nice but hardly great players. The only former All-Star on the team is Gerald Wallace, who is well past that point of his career.

Ainge’s recent drafts have produced a mix of solid choices (Avery Bradley, Jared Sullinger, Kelly Olynyk) and big misses (J.R. Giddens, JaJuan Johnson, Fab Melo), all of which is to be expected choosing in the middle to late parts of the first round. Smart has shown the most upside, yet Rozier seems to check many of the same boxes. James Young is very young. There is no Al Jefferson to build a blockbuster deal around, or Paul Pierce to entice a like-minded veteran star into joining the cause.

It’s all contextual with the Celtics at the moment and for every team that was able to make the big score, there are others who withered away on the vine hoping for the right opportunity that never materialized. Ainge has been through all of this before, of course. It took him five years to stockpile the players that turned into Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett and still have a lot left over including Rajon Rondo, Kendrick Perkins and Tony Allen. He’s done it before and he believes he can do it again in time.

"We’ll finish our roster this summer and obviously there’s holes in the big spots," Ainge said. "Our roster isn’t complete. If you’ve learned anything that’s one thing you should know. What you see today is not what you’ll see tomorrow or next month. We’re a team that’s building for a championship and we’ll continue to do that by trying to find the best players we can."

The party had long since wrapped up by that point and the only thing left to clean up was the uncomfortable air of uncertainty.

Here are five teams who helped themselves, and one who didn’t.

Portland: There’s two way this can go for the Blazers this summer. If LaMarcus Aldridge re-signs then they’re retooling. If he bolts, they’re rebuilding. Trading Nic Batum to the Hornets doesn’t make you better in the short run, but adding a prospect like Noah Vonleh and a solid player at a position of need in Gerald Henderson is a good trade at any point, particularly when Batum will be a free agent after this season. Likewise, dealing a late first-round prospect (even one I love in Rondae-Hollis Jefferson) for an established 7-footer like Mason Plumlee is a good deal at any stage of the process. Let’s see what the Blazers look like at the end of July before jumping to conclusions, but the gravest sin a team can make is extending the shelf life of a good but not great core.

Minnesota: It’s not that hard to screw up the first pick in the draft. See: Pervis Ellison, Joe Smith, Michael Olowokandi, Kwame Brown, Andrea Bargnani, Anthony Bennett, etc. In most of those cases the mistake was falling in love with the wrong big man and early in the process it seemed like Flip Saunders only had eyes for Jahlil Okafor. The Dukie may be a beast in the post, but Karl-Anthony Towns is the epitome of the postmodern big: a rangy, versatile defensive-minded player who can step out and space the floor. Add him to a crew that already includes Andrew Wiggins and suddenly the Wolves have two dynamic players to build around. Saunders’ work is far from done -- adding hometown fave Tyus Jones seems like a coup -- but the future in Minnesota looks far more promising than it did when the season ended.

New York: Count me among the Phil Jackson skeptics after a wasted first season that saw the Knicks trade a trio of useful players for minimal return. Yet Jackson redeemed himself with a forward-looking draft that started with Kristaps Porzingis. There’s a chance Porzingis will be a dud, as there is with every player taken in the draft, but there’s also a chance that he’ll become an evolutionary revelation. Dudes who are his height with that reach should not be able to do the things he can do with a basketball. If that was all Phil did, I’d be solidly in his camp but trading Tim Hardaway Jr. for a first-round pick that netted point guard Jerian Grant was pure sorcery. Jackson is building something. Finally.

Houston: It’s tough to stand out with a mid first-round pick, but Daryl Morey smartly grabbed Sam Dekker after he fell a bit to 18 and then snapped up another slider in Montrezl Harrell early in the second round. Both players should be able to step in and contribute immediately to a team that won 56 games and reached the conference finals. If this had been the Celtics draft, pundits would be saying they made the best of a bad situation. For the Rockets, it looks like great value. Time will tell who got the better haul.

Miami and Indiana: No teams fell further last season than the Heat and Pacers who dropped into the lottery after battling for Eastern Conference supremacy the previous two years. The reward for their drop? Having the chance to draft Justise Winslow (Miami) and Myles Turner (Indiana). In Winslow, the Heat have a ready-made swingman. In Turner, the Pacers have a stretch four who can help them transition from slow plodders to a sleeker, more modern approach. Nabbing Joe Young in the second round might be steal. Not a bad exchange for suffering through a frustrating injury-plagued season.

And one who didn’t ...

Sacramento: If it wasn’t clear before this week, it is now. The Kings are a dysfunctional mess. This all began two years ago when owner Vivek Ranadive hired a coach before his general manager. That created a philosophical rift that resulted in the rash decision to fire Michael Malone. GM Pete D’Alessandro is also gone, but not before hiring George Karl as a coach before Vlade Divac took over basketball operations. Ranadive doubled down on one of his biggest mistakes and to express shock at Karl’s meddling tendencies is to completely ignore history. Karl’s a terrific coach and Willie Cauley-Stein may be the defensive complement to fully unlock DeMarcus Cousins, but it’s troubling that they locked in on WCS despite several red flags and passed on Emmanuel Mudiay because the guard wouldn’t take a pre-draft meeting.