DANNY AINGE IS A GENIUS
God must designate you as a chosen one when He/She waves the wand and decides that you’ll be extraordinarily handsome or ravishingly beautiful, a superlative athlete, and something of a genius — or idiot savant — in any number of personal pursuits.
There are countless other more powerfully positive attributes which round out the persona — kindness, charity, self-effacement, inner strength, unconditional love, reliability, loyalty, sacrifice and the like — to be sure.
But to be gifted naturally in ways that border on defying logic is supernatural.
It is without explanation.
It cannot be foreseen.
Really.
Neither Larry Bird nor Kevin McHale nor even Robert Parish — the Boston Celtics original “Big Three” and the principal world-class needlers of one Danny Ainge (who admittedly made himself an easy target) — could have nor would have predicted this.
Danny Ainge is the best executive in the NBA. Hands down. Case closed.
Understand that Bird and McHale were both very good at this kind of thing in their post-playing afterlives and Bird still performs in this arena, but maybe not as well as he had. He seems to have lost a little of his mojo.
McHale has forsaken talent evaluation and coaching and is presently laboring in front of the mike.
And this was never for the Chief, he of the famously succinct and to-the-point incisive observations that, “…[it] was a helluva series.” or “…[it’s] gonna be a helluva series.”
He was too private a person to be grilled and skewered by the press.
But Ainge?
Well, DeMarcus “Boogie” Cousins was snatched right out from under his nose but stay tuned.
The kid whose finger was bitten by Wayne “Tree” Rollins (and not the other way around) in an on-court scrum some thirty years ago is poised to pounce again.
Today he doesn’t look like that tightly-muscled and sinewy cheetah — in the interest of full disclosure, he was always a little too ‘white’ and pink-skinned, to my way of thinking, to be described that way as an athlete and so was Bird for that matter — but beware.
The ability to maneuver and pounce, if prudent, is still there.
His competitiveness and zeal have never been in question.
The Baby-Faced Assassin.
Still.
Watch.
Danny Ainge was a two-sport professional athlete (Celtics and Toronto Blue Jays) joining an esteemed fraternity including Gene Conley, Bo Jackson, Deion Sanders and Brian Jordan.
(Jim Thorpe, Jim Brown, Bob Hayes, Charlie Ward, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Duke Kahanamoku, Jackie Robinson, Lolo Jones, Jonathan Ogden, Jeff Samardzija, Darin Erstad, Joe Mauer, Dave Winfield, Kenny Lofton, Tony Gwynn, Marion Jones, Antonio Gates, Jimmy Graham, Tony Gonzalez, Julius Peppers, Walter Ray Williams Jr., Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Ed “Too Tall” Jones, Herschel Walker, Scott Burrell, Chris Weinke, Jameis Winston, Michael Jordan and Ron Lee all certainly earn kudos as superhuman two-three-or-even-four-sport all-around athletic prodigies. They achieved distinction in their secondary sports either on the high school, college, Olympic or “professional” track-and field levels).
So clearly Ainge finds himself in the most select company.
Today he is the Celtics President of Basketball Operations, a position he has held for fourteen years, matching the length of his NBA playing career.
In 2008 he helped guide the club to its record 17th Championship — he was named NBA Executive of the Year — and nearly duplicated the feat in 2010, losing in the Finals to the archrival Lakers (4–3).
Ainge has deftly sidestepped the NBA franchise norm of experiencing painfully long and tedious boom-and-bust cycles (see the not-as-fortunate aforementioned Lakers among others).
The Celtics won a paltry 25 games three seasons ago in Head Coach Brad Stevens debut — more on Ainge/Stevens forthcoming — and worked their way up to tie for the Eastern Conference’s third-best record in the 2015–16 campaign.
The C’s at this writing find themselves 3 games behind Cleveland in the race for the conference’s #1 seed and Ainge deserves the lion’s share of the credit.
(After winning 48 ballgames last year the Celtics sit at 37 victories this season with 25 regular-season games remaining. If they play under .500 ball, they win one more game than last season. Any self-avowed prince of pessimism must in good faith and good conscience concede that regardless of the quality of their opponents the C’s — barring injury or other countervailing circumstances — are likely to go better than 12–13 to close it out in anticipation of the playoffs).
As Daryl Morey, a former member of the Celtics’ front office and since 2007 the Houston Rockets’ GM, notes “the hardest thing to do in the league is to put together a championship contender without having the team be really horrible for a long period. He’s [Ainge has] set the team up as well as any executive in the league.”
And that may be his greatest strength.
Ainge’s executive decision-making prowess is vaguely reminiscent of the basketball business acumen so often demonstrated by mentor Red Auerbach.
Through a series of well-planned moves, the most prominent of which was the June 2013 trade with Brooklyn, ultimately yielding first-round draft choices in 2014, 2016 and 2018 as well as the right to swap first-round picks in 2017, Ainge has the Celtics on the cusp of greatness yet again.
His knack for finding undervalued players is uncanny — Avery Bradley, Eddie House, Jae Crowder, Kelly Olynyk, Tyler Zeller, Jason Terry — but is perhaps best illustrated by the emergence and subsequent intergalactic play of one Isaiah Thomas, acquired from Phoenix for bench stalwart Marcus Thornton and a 2016 first-round selection from Cleveland.
His greatest coup of all however, may have been identifying Brad Stevens, a young and successful college coach, as the man to steer the ship, moving forward.
(Successful college coaches generally are not too good at this, right away or ever).
Now the league’s best executive has perhaps the league’s best coach.
And finds himself one impact player away from serious championship contention.
Kevin Durant could have been the one.
The scuttlebut is that Ainge & Co. were never interested in Cousins because of his excessive carry-on baggage and desperate need for a lobotomy but miracles do happen and in that vein — longshot that it may have been — he could have pushed them over the top.
Yet all of this is nothing more than water cascading over the dam.
And Ainge still has his assets; the goal is to hang banners.
Lest we are in error, there are few things that Danny Ainge would like more in his world of sports today than to hang Celtics Championship Banner #18.
And then #19…
If Ainge is unable to pull the trigger right now for a proven superstar you can be sure that he’s scouring the basketball landscape for the next one.
He’s as competitive as they come and he wants to win.
He has made certain that the Celtics are in very good shape.
How good? They are close.
How soon? Danny’s working while you and I sleep.
See that you awaken tomorrow, clear-headed and ready to go.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in February of 2017.]
ADDENDUM:
Last night (September 11, 2020) the Celtics defeated the defending champion Toronto Raptors in seven games to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals for the third time in four years.
