In early May 2003, Chris Wallace received a wake-up call that he didn’t request.
He was in Madrid for a scouting trip. At five a.m., while fast asleep in his hotel room, he was first surprised by a ringing phone. Then, when he picked it up, there was the slightly recognizable voice of his wife, Debby. He tried to piece together her report, but he was so groggy and she sounded scared, so it was hard to get a grip on what this was all about. He thought, Is the house burning down or something?
It was eleven p.m. in Boston, and Debby was watching the local news. The lead story was that an old Celtic, Danny Ainge, was returning to be the organization’s top man in basketball operations. He was here to do Wallace’s job. And Debby Wallace had been on enough NBA adventures with Chris that she thought she knew what was coming next. They had to be on the way out. Fired. That was how this usually worked.
The Wallaces knew how fun, and fragile, an NBA life could be. There couldn’t have been a bigger gap between Ainge and Chris Wallace. One was a gifted athlete in multiple sports, a two-time NBA champion, a smart and respected TV analyst. The other was an NBA outsider: He wasn’t an athlete; he grew up in Buckhannon, West Virginia, a four-hour drive from the closest NBA city (Washington, DC); and he got the league’s attention by his basketball publishing rather than playing.
When Ainge was celebrating the last Celtics’ championship, in 1986, Wallace was breaking into the league as a $9,000-a-year Portland Trail Blazers employee. He thought he’d made it big in 1990 when the man who hired him in Portland, Jon Spoelstra, got a job with the Denver Nuggets. Spoelstra brought Wallace with him and presented him with the biggest salary of his life: $60,000. An ecstatic Wallace called Debby, his fiancée then, and when she picked up the phone, he began singing “Rocky Mountain High.”
It’s a tough business. When Wallace returned from their honeymoon, he found out that Spoelstra and everyone connected to him had been fired.
With that context, of course, anyone associated with basketball operations would expect to be replaced. Grousbeck and Pags aggressively recruited Ainge for the position, not the other way around, so they’d give him what he wanted right now in his version of a honeymoon period.
But what a lot of people were about to learn about Ainge is that he wasn’t a conventional thinker. On one hand, he’d been unequivocal with his scouting report of the team on the court. It needed to change. He’d also told Grousbeck and Pags how much he valued franchise stability and alignment. He looked around the league at teams that casually removed coaches and GMs, good basketball people, as if they were changing computer wallpaper. How do you expect to be taken seriously, and have players take you seriously, if all people see is upheaval?
Frankly, it was one of the big concerns he expressed to Grousbeck, Pags, and Epstein, given the size of their ownership group. There were a lot of hands in there, men and women who’d contributed millions of dollars to be a part of this team. Ainge wanted to be assured that there wouldn’t be a problem if, for example, he stood by a coach who’d piled up a bunch of losses. Or a coach who was doing a good job, even if that wasn’t the public perception.
It was an important point that needed to be resolved before he could accept the assignment. He was more prescient than he realized.
Things were all right, personally, in the O’Brien-ownership relationship. O’Brien was seen as a devoted family man, and that resonated with the owners, who wanted to celebrate that throughout the organization. But there was friction when O’Brien was asked to consider things that no one had ever asked him to consider. He didn’t like it when he was questioned about the team’s style of play. He didn’t want to hear it when he was asked why the Celtics got so many technical fouls, and that conversation got worse when someone pointed out that analytics suggested berating the officials actually made things worse for your team.
Ah, analytics. Grousbeck and Pags valued them, and it was one of the reasons Daryl Morey was now a team vice president. But the only coach on O’Brien’s staff who seemed intrigued by the numbers was Frank Vogel, who also happened to be the staff’s youngest coach.
If Ainge had said he wanted to fire O’Brien, ownership wasn’t going to stand in the way of it. But he wasn’t interested in firing him. He met with the coach over five days, felt a strong bond with him, and instead wanted to give him a contract extension. A week and a half after taking the job, Ainge announced that O’Brien had been extended two years. Wallace was staying, too. The new boss believed he had a lot to figure out and not much time to do it and that he needed help from all angles.
It was already mid-May, and the NBA draft was approaching quickly.
It was going to take a couple of sizable mistakes from teams in front of the Celtics for Boston to acquire a future superstar in the draft. Pags was stunned when he saw the results from one of Morey’s studies. The point was to find out, over twenty years of research, the value of each draft position. The standard was simple: What percent chance does a team have of finding a starting NBA player from each slot?
The numbers were humbling.
Teams with the number one overall pick: 90 percent chance of finding a starter.
Teams with pick sixteen: 1 percent.
Teams with pick twenty: Scant results.
The Celtics had two picks in the first round, numbers sixteen and twenty. But Ainge made a deal with Memphis, and those picks became thirteen and twenty-seven. That left him a dozen picks and a lifetime away from the prize of the draft, an eighteen-year-old forward named LeBron James. Ainge had a running joke in the office, claiming that he’d trade the entire Celtics’ roster for James. But the more he said it, the less it sounded like a joke. James was going to be a number one choice destined to boost those grim analytics.
James was from the same midwestern city, Akron, Ohio, as Nate Thurmond and Gus Johnson, both in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Same city, different tradition. At six foot eight, James was taller than Johnson and bulkier than the lean, nearly seven-foot Thurmond. Still, when scouts looked for comparisons, they brought up Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan.
Antoine Walker had already played against James, and so had Jordan. Some of the top players in the league traveled to Chicago’s near West Side to play in a gym called Hoops. James was there, too, following the gym tradition of waiting his turn to play so the veterans could go first and lead off the pickup games.
That waiting was the perfect metaphor for James, who was already projected as the league’s next superstar. The team thirty miles away from his hometown, the Cleveland Cavaliers, had the top pick. James was the most anticipated selection in that franchise’s history, as the Cavs viewed James as a one-man revival for the team and the city.
For Ainge, this was his first opportunity to show supportive owners, and skeptical players and coaches, how he planned to shape the team. This draft was historically strong in the top five, and then it became a subjective exercise. At the end of the night on June 26, the newest Celtics were point guard Marcus Banks and center Kendrick Perkins, an eighteen-year-old high schooler from Texas. Walker was excited because he felt those were the two positions where the New Jersey Nets silenced the Celtics on their way to sweeping them out of the playoffs.
Paul Pierce remained curious two weeks later when he made the forty-minute drive from his house to the campus of the University of Massachusetts Boston. There was a weeklong NBA Summer League tournament happening there, and the rookies and free agents from the Celtics and Cavs were scheduled to play. Most people in the building were there to see James in person. Pierce said he was there for something else.
“I want to see Banks,” he said.
While that may have been the initial reason for the trip, it changed quickly. Banks looked like most rookie point guards with promise: a few good plays mixed with some decision-making that’s only acceptable for basketball in July. James, meanwhile, was clearly in the wrong league. He was more advanced, physically and mentally, than everyone around him. He was strong, quick, and charismatic. Pierce, who averaged 26 points per night, was usually in the position of having rookies worry about him. But he’d have to keep his eye on this one.
Cleveland had been so bad in the previous season that even a generational prodigy couldn’t make the Cavs an instant contender. Pierce and Walker were thinking about how they matched up with the Nets and Pistons, the other contenders in the East. Vin Baker had gone through rehab and was now projected to be the team’s starting center. He looked and sounded good, and he drew compliments from all of his teammates. He knew his consequences were different this season because he’d agreed to daily alcohol testing. A relapse could affect his career and his contract.
The progress and status of Baker was one of the major preseason stories—until Ainge gave the region and league a jolt with something else.
He traded Walker and his college teammate, Tony Delk, to Dallas in exchange for Raef LaFrentz, Jiri Welsch, Chris Mills, and a 2004 first-round pick. The deal wasn’t surprising to a handful of people—Grousbeck, Pags, and O’Brien, who were aware of how Ainge viewed Walker. Everyone else was shocked.
Walker was devastated. He’d been hanging out with friends at Mohegan Sun Casino and had a hard time concentrating on what Ainge was saying over the phone.
“We’re going in a different direction. But I’m trading you to a really good team and good situation.”
Walker was from Chicago, but he’d adopted Boston as his own. He loved the tradition and stories he learned when people like Red Auerbach, Bill Russell, and Tommy Heinsohn would pull him aside to chat. His first coach, former Celtic M. L. Carr, treated him like a son. He was amazed when he went around town and heard the passion and basketball knowledge of the fans. He relished being a Celtics captain, and members of the support staff could feel it in tangible ways; he bought them suits and shoes, split his playoff shares with them, and picked up meals on the road.
After that phone call with Ainge, he immediately called his agent. He just needed help wrapping his head around this thing. He was going to Dallas? He’d convinced himself that he’d have a fifteen-year career, with all of it spent in Boston.
It wasn’t just that the trade was hard for Walker to process. The return for Walker, whose contract was set to expire in two seasons, seemed uninspired. LaFrentz, who played at Kansas with Pierce, had been disappointing in his career and had five years remaining on his contract. Mills was injured. Welsch was unproven. As for the pick, it would likely be in the mid- to late twenties—the longshot / no shot zone of Daryl Morey’s study—if Dallas played as well as expected.
Ainge didn’t think the Celtics were a contender when others did. Now everyone could see that they weren’t. They split their first ten games of the season, but this wasn’t about winning. This was about acquiring assets in all forms—promising players, players with expiring contracts, first- and second-round picks, good role-players—shuffling them around, and making incremental progress toward some ideal that only Ainge could imagine.
O’Brien was on board with the Walker trade, but he wasn’t totally comfortable with how Ainge viewed the season. O’Brien, naturally, thought like a coach—that is, he didn’t believe anyone was going to look at his record and make excuses for him. No one was going to remember that he began to lose games that his team used to win because his franchise, overnight, began to play a shell game with his roster.
He’d seen too much of the coaching pattern: When they win, they stay. As soon as they start to lose, even the slightest lull, they’re out.
It had just happened in Orlando.
It wasn’t that long ago when everyone in the NBA was applauding Magic coach Glenn “Doc” Rivers. He’d been the Coach of the Year in 2000 when he got his team, with an unheard of four undrafted players in the starting five, to win as often as it lost. It was quite an achievement. Then, by dint of his eloquence and elite salesmanship, he was able to recruit free agents Tracy McGrady and Grant Hill to Orlando. They became a playoff team then. Injuries and expectations crushed them at the beginning of the season, and after a 1–10 start, Rivers was fired.
O’Brien didn’t know Ainge well enough to understand that Ainge was rebelling against that pattern. That’s exactly the thing he’d talked about with Grousbeck and Pags. Ainge was a bit of a riddle for sure: a bold dealmaker who appreciated stability.
In December, O’Brien finally got his imperfect team to win several games in a row. They’d pushed their winning streak to a modest five, and now they were close to even on the season. Not many people in Boston were paying attention to them because the New England Patriots hadn’t lost a game since October, and the Red Sox were trying to trade for Alex Rodriguez, the best player in baseball. Boston, as a whole, was becoming what Ainge’s Celtics had been in the 1980s: a place with an appetite for champions. Still, O’Brien was proud of what they’d done. If this were his job review, he’d highlight this; this was the employee displaying creativity with limited resources.
Then Ainge called. Those resources were about to be remixed and reshuffled again. Ainge had completed a trade with Cleveland. Boston was getting a second-round pick and Ricky Davis, a skilled player with a questionable attitude and lack of defensive intensity. To get him, the Celtics had to part with two more of O’Brien’s trusted veteran players, Tony Battie and Eric Williams.
As the season moved into January, leading the Celtics became more challenging. The new players had to be managed, and one veteran player, Baker, needed professional help. He’d begun the season with a flourish. He had All-Star Games and Olympic Games on his résumé, and it showed. He had more double-digit scoring nights in the first ten games than he’d had all of the previous season. But when his performance abruptly dipped, his coworkers knew what it meant. It was confirmed by the tests that he’d agreed to as well. He’d begun drinking again, and he was suspended indefinitely on January 20. His Celtics career was effectively over.
One week later, O’Brien began to reflect on his own job. He’d signed that extension in May, and here he was in January, unhappy. He had a lot of things on his mind, and he wanted to share them. Ainge liked hearing different opinions from everyone in the organization, and he was about to receive them from his head coach.
They needed to talk.
Ainge and Grousbeck were already at the practice facility with O’Brien, and Pags was at Bain in a meeting. In the middle of that meeting, he learned O’Brien was thinking about leaving the Celtics. He rushed out of the office, got into his car, and found himself in thick Boston traffic. He knew then he’d be a few minutes late, and he was hopeful that nothing got out of hand before he arrived.
As traffic lightened and Pags sped to the facility, O’Brien began speaking to Ainge and Grousbeck. He listed all the things he didn’t like, such as the uncertain roster, the trade for Ricky Davis, and what he perceived as heavy-handedness and meddling from ownership. He could have gone on. Ainge listened; Grousbeck got annoyed. O’Brien began raising his voice, and Grousbeck did the same. Pags, still hustling in, was missing a heated disagreement.
Honestly, Grousbeck and O’Brien were really arguing about the current season plus their time together before Ainge was hired. The organization had changed dramatically in just fifteen months. O’Brien worked for Paul Gaston for five and a half years, yet he’d already seen more of Grousbeck and Pags than he ever did of Gaston. The radical culture change wasn’t for him.
By the time Pags arrived at the meeting, three minutes late, he saw the flushed faces and understood that the hard-line positions were clear: O’Brien said he didn’t like how things were going, and Grousbeck asked for his resignation.
Pags tried to suggest cooling down a bit before any rash decisions were made, but O’Brien was convinced that stepping away from the job was the best decision, and Grousbeck agreed with him. Ainge saw it for what it was. He had a coach who didn’t see the big picture and a man who was honest enough to say that he wasn’t okay with where they were headed. If he wasn’t on board, Ainge thought, now was the time to jump off.
They wished each other well and came to their first unanimous decision of the season: This was over.
Forty-two games into year one, Ainge needed to find a coach who could be firmly planted in this rubble and, like him, still glimpse a championship horizon beyond it.