CELTICS DRAFT PREVIEW: DRAFTING FOR NEED WHEN THEY NEED IT ALL

WEEI

BEN ROHRBACK

Danny Ainge, Mike Zarren and company couldn't be more thrilled to evaluate talent. (Fernando Medina/Getty Images)

After a surprisingly successful season, just about everyone can agree the Celtics were greater than the sum of their parts in 2014-15, a widely regarded truth that was reflected in Brad Stevens finishing fourth in Coach of the Year voting.

With that in mind, does any one player on the Celtics make you stop and think, “Yeah, he’s their foundational starter at his position on a championship team”?

The answer is no, right? Marcus Smart may one day offer a rebuttal, but nobody should be penciling him in as the starting point guard on the road to Banner 18 just yet, despite an occasionally impressive Second Team All-Rookie campaign.

So, it’s hard to say Danny Ainge should abandon his philosophy of drafting the best player on the board on June 25, but at some point the team has to address its glaring holes in shot creation on the wing and rim protection in the paint.

The free agent class of 2015 offers a wealth of options, few of which are game-changers and even fewer of which will consider Boston. Kawhi Leonard and Marc Gasol aren’t walking through that door. If Ainge wants to patch those holes for the upcoming season and give Stevens a legitimate chance to start winning playoff games, chances are he’ll have to do so via trade or through the draft.

We’ve already covered the pros and cons of pursuing DeMarcus Cousins and will continue assessing Ainge’s top options on the trade and free agency markets in this space each Tuesday leading up to July 1, but don’t the Celtics have to start using all these draft picks to fix their biggest problems, too?

They have good players at every position and great ones at none of them, so if Ainge believes he can draft a future All-Star -- or use his cache of assets to move up for one -- by all means he shouldn’t be concerned whether it’s another point guard, power forward or whatever. Otherwise, he’d be wise to focus on the small forwards and centers available in the mid-to-late first round.

The Celtics were 12-6 with Marcus Smart, Avery Bradley and Isaiah Thomas in the lineup, and that triumvirate played 90 percent of the available minutes in the backcourt during the playoffs. Considering their versatility and the C’s $18 million investment in them, they’ll likely continue to do so in 2015-16.

The C’s spent two straight first-round picks on Jared Sullinger and Kelly Olynyk, whose respective skills in theory make for one solid stretch forward. In practice, they’ve created somewhat of a logjam at the 4, especially with soon-to-be free agents Brandon Bass and Jonas Jerebko in the mix at the end of this past season.

Jae Crowder, who will almost certainly be re-signed during his restricted free agency this summer, also enjoyed success during stretches at the 4 in smaller lineups, and he’s not exactly a shot creator at the 3. The C’s two best players in that regard are a 5-foot-9 point guard and Evan Turner, who is a whole lot better at creating shots than making them, as his 47.0 true shooting percentage ranked dead last among the league’s starting forwards in 2013-14.

That leaves James Young as the lone hope for an heir to Paul Pierce’s position, unless you’re buying into the legend of Gigi Datome or discovered that Hot Tub Time Machine Doc Rivers was selling us on every training camp. But Young showed few signs of stardom in a rookie season spent mostly in the D-League, although he’s still just 19 years old and represents the kind of risk Ainge needs to take with latter-round picks if he hopes to uncover diamonds in the rough.

And while Olynyk is listed as a center on the roster and Tyler Zeller made significant strides at the position this past season, neither is anywhere near the sort of rim protector that Ainge can build his next championship team around.

There are minutes to be had at small forward and center. The Celtics hope Young earns some of them on the wing, but it would be nice to see picks Nos. 16 and 28 from this year’s draft competing for playing time, too, even if only to showcase them as chips for bigger moves down the road. In trade discussions this summer, Smart is a whole lot more valuable than Young, since only one has proven himself, and the C’s two first-round picks will similarly plummet in value if they’re stuck sitting behind the team’s guard trio and power forward logjam.

DraftExpress projects six centers and six small forwards will be taken in the first round. While Ainge probably doesn’t have enough to trade into the top five for Duke teammates Jahlil Okafor or Justise Winslow, he might have the assets to move up for Kentucky center Willie Cauley-Stein or Arizona wing Stanley Johnson. At the very least, he can sit back and take whichever small forward between Kelly Oubre, Rondae Hollis-Jefferson or Sam Dekker falls to No. 16, and then take a risk on a rim protector like Robert Upshaw at No. 28. (The latter scenario plays out in our first stab at a mock draft over on Green Street).

All that being said, the Celtics will probably draft a couple more power forwards and rightfully stick to the “best player available” mantra. In the end, technically you’re always drafting for need when you need just about everything.

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Although the Celtics have several needs, I think that this draft needs to be used to get a lane-clogging center. This can be done by trading up or by using the draft picks that we have so many of to get an already established center.

The guard and forward positions will be easier to fill via either other trades, free agency or draft picks. A better outside shooter at the small forward and a better rim attacker at the shooting guard would be nice, but the guys coming back next year seemed to fill lots of those minutes at least fairly well last year. And, with another summer of development the Stevens Summer Camp may even come back better next year.

To get to 50 wins next year guys like Bass, Olynyk and Sullinger just cannot play as many minutes at the center position as they did this year. For different reasons all three are just not centers. Zeller is more than acceptable as a starter against some teams, but is probably better coming off the bench. He really cannot be counted on to play much more than half of any game on a regular basis so the other 24 minutes at center need to be much improved.