Possibly the best win-win situation for Boston this summer isnt in F/A. A Recipe for offseason moves...

This might just be the summer of firework for Boston that many had hoped for last summer, a zillion assets in young, cheap players, even more draft picks- 2 firsts #'s 16 & 28 as well as 2nd rounder's #'s 33 and 45, and then there's the matter of about 26 million in cap space. What about all those trade exceptions? What'll happen in the draft? who do we sign/resign? Who gets traded? A Guy in green once stated "Anything's possible- and with Danny Ainge, it dern well is.

The problems with out draft picks is the latter three could all be more duds and how they affect our salary cap could hurt us more than the players might actually benefit us. #16? well who knows. Danny has proven he's able to find some real gems in the draft... but then there's Fab Melo..

With all that in mind, I took a seat in my Armchair GM Time Machine and looked up Draft day 1015 and beyond in a rather nice alternate reality which is exactly like ours except every restaurant is a Hooters, all the Hooter Girls resemble Victoria Secret Models and Hooters in this reality serves BBQ ribs and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.

In this reality Danny Ainge only signs two Free Agent.. old geezers both of them, but more on that in a moment.

In this reality the Celtics were the subjects of all kinds of trades leading up to draft day, mostly with talk of a Draft picks+ Olynyk sort of deal for Cousins. That never happened, although the Kings actually did make Boston a counter offer that Danny almost bite on. Irregardlessly, when the Lakers found themselves with time to kill before making the 7th pick of the 2015 draft they decided to hear Danny Ainge's trade offer and decided for some reason they liked it- enough to say sure- why not? then at the very last minute Mr. Silver found himself announcing that, the Boston Celtics, not the Lakers would be taking Willie Cauley-Stein. Boston however was now out of the first round of the draft and no longer had a long haired hippy looking dood on the team to make Kevin Love not want to come to Boston.

Not only did Boston pick up a extremely promising player who could intimidate around the rim- but a fast forward in time showed him ending up being a ROY, a 4 time DPOY and helping Boston win (X- no spoilers here!!) titles- (ok yes, titles- there's your spoiler), but the team ended up saving about 3 million in salary in the trade as well. Yes Boston fans were a bit gibby at this point. But the real news came via ESPN between the 10th and 11th picks. No the next bit of news didn't have anything to do with that news, it just came out at that time. Biggest trade of the night btw... It was announced that Billy King, who was under orders to somehow make it so that Brooklyn wouldn't be paying a hundred gillion dollars in extra taxes figured Danny Ainge might just be a good trading partner, and that Danny just might want Deron Williams and Brook Lopez and Danny had actually said yeah sure, why not?

The deal went something like this, Boston sent Wallace and Pressley- whose team option Boston exercised, the 33rd and 45th picks in the draft and the Nets sent Lopez and Williams and their 2022 first rounder top 10 protected (Billy was showing signs of learning) in which case unprotected the following year and gave Boston the right to swap firsts in 2025. The Nets were out of luxury tax but still over the 66.4 mill cap, while Boston was now teetering on The Cap themselves. The two teams followed that up with a second trade. Boston used its 7.5 million trade exception from the Prince trade and Brooklyn sent them Jarret Jack, the rights to Boston's second round pick in 2017 should they sway firsts and the nets 2020 & 2021 second round picks.

The end result of this was a sort of win-win for both teams, the Nets saved tens of millions of dollars, which was good. And they really sucked in 15-16. I mean really sucked. 13-69 kind of sucking i'm talking about here- and they sucked all the way to a #1 pick in the summer of 2016. Too bad for them Boston owned the rights to that pick though. Oh and ditto for 2017- the #3 pick that summer however. It wasn't so good for Billy King it seems. Apparently he'd been told to never under any circumstances to ever trade with Ainge again. Seems he thought the get out of Luxury Tax no matter what overrode that. Well he was wrong and was fired the day after the draft. As a side note, three days later King disappeared and was never seen again. One reporter said when they called the Nets owner up over in Russia he was very vague in offering his thoughts about Kings whereabouts- but the reporter - who was having a difficult time understanding everything said thought he'd heard something about "visiting Hoffa"... I'm not sure what that meant and it wasn't Celtics news so I let that story go.

Back in Boston, Danny Ainge was feeling pretty good about himself. He'd given up one youngling and some first and second round draft picks this season, and in exchange got the best young player involved in the deal, saved a few bucks on that deal too. Then added to his arsenal of future firsts and the chance to improve his teams fortunes by getting the chance to trade up in the draft by swapping picks with the Nets.. (little did he know, the city was secretly planning to erect a statue of him standing next to Red's statue.) But then, he figured come July 1, all the work he had left to do would be to go through the scraps and see what could be had for the M.L.E. The day the before the first however he got a call from Minny, who reminded him of how nice they'd been all those years ago sending KG his way and all, and could he help them out with a certain issue? It seemed they were sort of out of the mix when it came to going after a top tier F/A though the word on the streets was a star who really wanted to come to Minny, and since this had never happened before, could Danny help them out? If he'd just take Nikola Pekovic off their hands with that 12.5 TPE he had in his pocket, it'd really help them. And besides, with this new F/A the team's protected pick would almost certainly become Danny's the following summer. Minny said they sure would appreciate some help.

Danny agreed Minny had been very nice to him in the past, and he did have that TPE just sitting there, but then, they had said they would appreciate some help.. just how much he wanted to know. Minny said they thought, taking the protection of that first the next year, the teams 2018 first and a couple million cash would show how much they appreciated the gesture and Danny agreed that such an arrangement would do nicely.

That next day, It was Danny, who was just getting out his rolodex that got a phone call. Remember those two old geezers I'd mentioned earlier? One of them was on the other line. Some guy whose team had just recently fallen to the Clippers in the NBA finals wanted to say hi to Danny and thank him for the congradatory note following his triple double in game 7 vs the Cav's when the former Celtic's current team beat Lebron and company- oh yeah, and him and KG had been talking. KG it seemed wanted one last go around and the two wanted to end their careers together, and how, they both thought, going back to Boston and helping the team try for #18 might not be such a bad idea. Heck they'd be willing to split the M.L.E between them even if Danny wouldn't mind signing them.

So Boston now had Paul Peirce and Kevin Garnet back for one last season.

Well that was about how it went all down, Boston's 2015 summer in this alternate reality. Of course there is more, like how Danny decided he didn't need ALL the bigs he now had so traded Zeller to the Lakers for their 2018 first. How the league considered banning teams from giving the Celtics first rounder's Did I mention all that stuff Stein accomplished? Yeah I think I did... Hmmm.. not much else to say, Lopez and Williams were pretty healthy all season and after 2016 would both move on and sign better sized contracts with other teams than one might have expected. A lot of that had to do with Stevens revitalizing their careers everyone agreed. Sully ended up having that breakout season and got Most Improved Player the following year. Young's game really came around as well, PP had a lot to do with that of course. Speaking of Paul, him and KG did end up retiring. In fact their careers ended with them on the floor together at the buzzer of their last game. The two future HOF'ers were crying and hugging. Oddly enough Doc Rivers was right there as well, joining them seconds after the final buzzer. He was crying too- though no one even considered for a second that it might have been because his Clippers team had just failed to win a second title in a row.

Well that's all I have to say, besides after hte game I'd stopped by a Hooters and picked up some Ribs.. man them Hooters Ribs are hard to beat.

Anyhow, one last thought, I wonder what our Reality will look like? This other one wasn't too bad.

Matty, you must have eaten some inspirational wings at your favorite House of Ill Repooters.  I'm making up a special scoreboard of your pronouncements, and it should be fun keeping track.  Liking that deal with the Lakers especially.

Sam