Navigating dangerous C’s

BOSTON HERALD

Danny Ainge faces tough decisions on team’s course

If LeBron James’ peeps were advising Danny Ainge, they’d tell him to call ESPN to announce “The Decision” because he’s actually facing one.

James’ version of “The Decision” was whether to hang in Cleveland or Miami. If that’s difficult for you, somebody else needs to be making your decisions.

Ainge’s version is whether to hang the Celtics [team stats]’ future on the aging joints and connective tissue of Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce [stats] again, a decision that could hang up his team and end up hanging Ainge.


Sometimes decisions are easy to make, even if the emotional baggage is not easy to take. This is not one of those times.

The emotional side of detaching from Big Three Lite (difficult though it might be for Doc Rivers and a portion of the Celtics faithful), doesn’t seem to weigh heavily on Ainge’s shoulders. That is not to say he has no affection for them, but Ainge prides himself on being a realist living in a fictitious world.

This is not to say he is without emotion, but Ainge has shown an ability to compartmentalize in a Belichickian manner, walling off emotion and expecting players to do the same. He tried that a year ago by trading Kendrick Perkins [stats] and it proved a mistake, the kind some of his players struggled to recover from. You can’t trade on Ubuntu and then trade half your team in a weekend.

He nearly did it again this year, shopping mercurial Rajon Rondo [stats] around as if he were Brussels sprouts in a failed effort to land Chris Paul. Fortunately, a deal couldn’t be made and Paul spent much of his spring on a sofa watching Rondo’s rise in the playoffs.

Such are the pitfalls of Ainge’s job. His role is to sustain a team. He’s not in the hand-holding business. Yet over the next few weeks he faces decisions fraught with danger no matter what he does, because there is no good solution, only guess work.

Does he bring back a 36-year-old Garnett, assuming Garnett wants to come back for reduced money? Does he rehire Allen, who turns 37 next month and who just had painful bone spurs removed from his right ankle that severely limited him during the playoffs?

Does he believe this aging group plus Rondo, Avery Bradley, perhaps Jeff Green if Ainge can outbid other suitors, and Brandon Bass can challenge the Heat, Bulls, Magic, Sixers and, if they run that gauntlet, the Thunder? Or is it ever diminishing returns?

Was Garnett’s late-season revival a last hurrah or something he can duplicate? Were Allen’s ankle injury and Pierce’s aching knee signs of things to come from endless pounding on NBA hardwood?

How much of reaching Game 7 of the conference finals was serendipity and how much a reminder of what Big Three Lite still can do when Garnett is right? How much was the result of a shortened season? How much was because Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah went down in Chicago?

Ainge cannot truly know the answers, yet must come up with some. If he believes a healthy Bulls team would have run the Celtics out of the playoffs before they reached the Heat then he should bite the bullet and start anew while he has money to spend, two late first-round draft picks and the basis for a young team anchored by Rondo, Bradley and perhaps Green.

If Ainge believes, as many others do, that the Celtics’ playoff run was as much about injuries on other teams as it was Garnett’s sudden resurgence then he should pull the trigger and get on with it, but that’s easier said than done.

Garnett averaged 19.2 points per game in the postseason, 10th best in the playoffs, and 10.3 rebounds, fifth best. No one had an answer for him when he went to the low block and the C’s have no replacement for that. Yet is it sustainable?

What of Pierce and Allen? Had they been forced to play another 16 regular-season games, as they will have to next season, would they have broken down sooner?

There’s no room for sentiment with so much to consider, yet Ainge knows for the short term he’s a captive of KG and the Band. There is no replacement for what Garnett brings on the roster or in free agency. But what is the guarantee he’s getting the player we saw in May and June and not the one in February and March?

KG has yet to indicate if he wants to play again or, if so, what his price is. He is smart enough to know it’s no longer $21,247,044 as it was this year. Will an often too proud man play for half?

Perhaps, but then the question becomes are you sure he’s still worth it? Were the playoffs a sign of what Garnett has left or a fuse burning brightly just before it explodes?


Is Allen’s tank finally near empty? Will Pierce go in the tank without them? Is it better to come close with them or suffering rebuilding’s growing pains without them?

Who knows?

Hopefully Danny Ainge.