DANNY’S FIREWORKS!
AINGE LIGHTS UP HUB WITH HAYWARD SCORE FOR C’S
SALT LAKE CITY — The Celtics didn’t win a championship last night. There are still moves that need to be made and mountains in Oakland and Cleveland to scale.
But by reaching agreement with Gordon Hayward on a fouryear, nearly $128 million deal, the Celts did take a wrecking ball to the notion, given a standing eight count last summer, that marquee free agents will not come to Boston.
The Celtics have gone after the three most prized and legitimately available targets over the last two years.
As of tomorrow, they will have signed two of them.
And while Hayward joins fellow max-contract recruit Al Horford, it should be noted that the C’s were among the final few with a chance at Kevin Durant.
Free agents go where they can get paid and where they have a chance to win. After that, other factors come into play. For Horford, it was, following nine seasons in Atlanta, the chance to play in a city where basketball matters.
For Hayward, having satisfied the monetary and competitive aspects, it was undoubtedly the presence of Brad Stevens, his former coach at Butler. He also mentioned in his Players’ Tribune announcement “the winning culture of Boston, as a city — from the Sox, to the Pats, to the Bruins. There was the special history of the Celtics, as a franchise — from Russell, to Bird, to Pierce, and it goes on.”
There is, as well, the public expectation that comes with the arrival of a highly-paid star, and here is where he’ll need Danny Ainge to ease that entry. The addition of Hayward alone isn’t enough to alter the fortunes in the way that Durant would have, but he’s a critical element of the club’s reconstruction.
While we’re still investigating a report that Ainge exhaled hard enough to cause a 20-foot wave to roar across the Great Salt Lake, his work is far from done. The president of basketball operations may have most of the offense he needs to compete with the league’s elite, but he’s still going to need to find people to fetch the basketball after it caroms off the backboard and/or rim. Rebounding is still be a major issue for the Celtics.
Though it is his job to focus on the empty portions of the green glass, it’s probably fair to say that every team that is not Golden State or Cleveland has a little Shamrock envy at this moment. Even clubs like San Antonio and Houston and Oklahoma City that are presumably still ahead of the Celts on the food chain have to be a bit jealous of the Brooklyn and Lakers-Sacramento first-round picks in the C’s pocket, and of young players like Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum who may struggle to find playing time.
The Celtics are in the deep playoff discussion, and they have a line on reinforcements. So while it was frustrating to see Ainge hold his wallet and whiff on trades for good players, it’ll be interesting to see how Scrooge McAinge is viewed now.
Ainge has been working off a plan that even he couldn’t be sure he’d be able to execute. For the last several months, it’s been stated in this space that the Celtics had to have been given at least some indication by Hayward that he’d listen to their pitch, but there was no guarantee that he’d make the move.
The sense I’ve gotten from people around the Jazz is that Hayward had been leaning toward the C’s for quite some time, and that certainly makes sense. He’d maintained ties with Stevens, and there is no way he would have strung his former Butler coach along were he not extremely interested in joining his team.
Beyond the draft, which was a given, the Celtics built their offseason improvement plan around Hayward. They hoped to reach agreement with him and then turn up the heat on Indiana for a Paul George trade, but the latter portion was taken off the table last Friday.
Hayward had to know that he was the Celts’ last chance to sign a major free agent for quite a while as they prepare to deal with some of their overachieving and underpriced people next summer. He had to understand that keeping the C’s in the hunt is keeping them for other business that may be passing them by as they wait for his call.
But all was well for the Celtics at the end of a long, strange day of reports and denials. Early in the Fourth of July afternoon, a text message arrived from an NBA coach. “This is nuts,” he wrote. Then, even as team reps and Hayward’s agent denied strongly that a decision had been made and things calmed down, representatives from three teams checked in here, wondering who might be leaving Boston if Hayward arrived. The Celts would have to clear some space to give the All-Star forward a maximum contract, and clubs were looking for valuable pieces that could be available in a yard sale.
Realizing that Isaiah Thomas, Horford, Brown and Tatum aren’t going anywhere under most any circumstances, there are still players who need to be freed to help elsewhere, and the rest of the league is circling.
So while the Celtics still aren’t speed-dialing the basketball Betsy Ross to stitch their 18th banner, it is perhaps the best measure of their progress that good players want to come to Boston and opponents want what’s leaving.