In May 2006, once again playoff outsiders, the Celtics had a slide deck that outlined their strategic plan. In the multistep process, the illustration showed how the team could use some of its current players and assets to become a championship contender.
It seemed hard to believe that a thirty-three-win team anchored by Paul Pierce actually owned championship resources, but according to that strategic plan, there was a realistic path to follow:
• They could use Raef LaFrentz’s contract, along with some of their young draft picks, to acquire a top-level starter.
• They could use Wally Szczerbiak’s contract to acquire a second-tier star to play with Pierce.
• They could simply develop what they had, a talented and young quartet of Al Jefferson, Kendrick Perkins, Tony Allen, and Delonte West, and hope Pierce wanted to stay with that maturing group.
• Or they could go with their least attractive option, which was to trade Pierce and start over.
The organization could feel Pierce’s urgency. He was going to be twenty-nine in a few months. He’d averaged nearly 27 points per game the previous season. Reached his career high in field-goal percentage. Listened to Doc Rivers. Encouraged his young teammates. Had that 50-point game against LeBron. Tried to be a good Celtic and all the things people said he wasn’t. It earned him a pat on the back and a shutout from the All-NBA teams.
Now what?
Rivers enjoyed talking with Red Auerbach about life and basketball, and he’d often ask thoughtful questions that Auerbach would answer with pithy one-liners. When he asked Auerbach to sum up his team philosophy in a nutshell, he was given an answer that he quickly adopted: “Get the ball. Don’t give up the ball.”
It was simple and powerful, but Auerbach was astute enough to know that these Celtics struggled to do it.
“Doc, your team is too nice,” Auerbach told him one day. “Every good team needs some instigators. If you look at all the great Celtics teams, they had great players. And instigators.”
Danny Ainge knew what Auerbach meant, but Ainge could see how it was harder to find great players than instigators. He’d done a good job of discovering talent in less-than-ideal draft slots, and that shrewd drafting brought the Celtics closer to where they wanted to be. A few weeks before the draft, they’d need to keep up their streak of picking solid players who would be useful for them or, most likely, intriguing to other teams in a trade package for an All-Star.
For the 2006 draft, the people in the room with Ainge had different roles.
Just under four years had passed since Morey, then a nimble consultant, helped Wyc Grousbeck understand the NBA salary cap on deadline. It had been two years since he identified Mike Zarren as someone who could give the organization a new dimension. Now, Morey was leaving. The Houston Rockets, interested in a more analytical front-office approach, hired him as their new general manager.
While Ainge hadn’t said much to Zarren in their initial interview, the two talked daily now. One year earlier, Zarren did a clerkship for a federal judge in Columbus, Ohio, by day and sent his detailed statistical reports to the Celtics by night. At the height of trade season, he was probably the only person in the league balancing salary-cap data and details from a death penalty case. Ainge decided that he wanted Zarren as a full-time Celtic, so Zarren was officially and wholly part of the management team now.
Front-office personnel in Boston, Minneapolis, and Seattle were all being scrutinized by their star players. It was going to be tough for Kevin Garnett to be patient and restrained this year. The Wolves traded players with the Celtics last season, and now the two franchises were in the same place. Literally. Both teams were in the draft lottery with identical records of thirty-three wins and forty-nine losses. They held the sixth and seventh picks in the draft. Just a few spots behind them were Ray Allen’s 35–47 Seattle SuperSonics, picking tenth.
The three All-Stars from those franchises were all linked and not just as restless lottery alums attached to lottery teams. They were all growing as basketball thinkers and analysts, and if their teams couldn’t make smart moves in the next few opportunities to do it—draft night in June, the February 2007 trading deadline, postdeadline free agents in March 2007—they were going to say something about it.
In what had now become a standard part of their scouting process, the Celtics viewed prospects through analytical and traditional lenses. For example, scout Ryan McDonough had returned from Argentina in 2005 praising an unusual player from an under-twenty-one international tournament. He was Team USA’s point guard, and his name was Rajon Rondo.
He played collegiately at Kentucky, and he had an atypical profile. He was six foot one, but he played bigger than that. He was wiry, and from a distance, it appeared that he was being swallowed by his headband and jersey. Up close, though, his strength was obvious, and his broad shoulders suggested that a lot more muscle could be added there.
Rondo had the potential to fill both of Red’s categories, great player and instigator. That sounded good on a scouting report, but closer investigation revealed that he could be a great player for his team and an instigator against his team. He was smart and stubborn, and he could tune out coaches and teammates if he didn’t agree with them. His passing was magical at times, while his jump shot was unreliable.
Old-school scouting alone would project Rondo as a late first-round pick. Analytics projected an All-Star. The Celtics found ways to view him at the intersection of both.
They compiled footage of all the guards in the draft, and they kept track of specific categories. Their draft model wanted to know how often a guard’s opponent went by him, how often the opponent passed, and how often the guard himself stole the ball or deflected it. This was a draft model that gushed over Rondo. His numbers came out at 12 percent, a mark that tripled the second-place finisher.
But as Ainge said so eloquently in his first meeting with Zarren and Morey, some numbers can be stupid. So the next thing for the Celtics was to see Rondo in person against the other top guards of the draft. Less than a week before draft day, the Celtics hosted Rondo, Villanova’s Randy Foye, and Connecticut’s Marcus Williams in a joint workout. The other two guards were rated significantly higher than Rondo by most scouts, and the draft was expected to reflect that.
It was a different story in the workout. Matched up against Foye and Williams, Rondo dominated them in every category and drill. It was so lopsided that on that day, at least, it was clear who the future All-Star was. Unfortunately for the Celtics, there was something else for them to consider about Rondo that the draft models couldn’t say: He was intensely competitive and peerless in big games and moments, but he could drift if he determined that someone or something—an opponent, suggestion, coach, or teammate—wasn’t worth his time.
Ainge clicked with Rondo at the draft workout, and there was something about the player’s uniqueness that stayed on his mind. “I really love this little sucker Rondo,” he told Grousbeck. “He’s aggressive. Tenacious. He’s my guy.” Grousbeck had heard Ainge mention Rondo so much before the draft that the co-owner decided that he was going to watch on draft day to see where the guard landed.
Boston was unlikely because on the morning of the draft, Ainge made a cap-clearing deal. LaFrentz, who came to the Celtics with a burdensome contract in the first Walker trade, was sent to Portland along with the seventh pick. In return for him, the Celtics acquired the Blazers’ backup point guard, twenty-one-year-old Sebastian Telfair.
It made sense that Telfair would be the Celtics’ starter since they gave up such a valuable pick to acquire him. But the Celtics also had Rondo rated as the seventh-best overall player. Since he once owned the seventh pick, Ainge could have easily taken him there. But he wanted to move the LaFrentz contract, acquire a player like Telfair, and still find a way to get the athletic Rondo.
As the draft unfolded, it looked like Rondo wasn’t going to be picked where Ainge guessed he might be, in the middle of the first round. Grousbeck indeed was watching, and he got an idea outside the top ten as J. J. Redick, Hilton Armstrong, and Thabo Selfolosha came off the board. The co-owner loved watching Ainge work in the draft room because of how strategic he was. He’d seen Ainge create several draft lists weeks before the actual draft and then go back and tear those lists apart. He liked the way that Ainge always had five potential players for each slot and the way he’d make a point to consider all the opinions in the room. Then, sometimes, he’d take off. He’d leave the room briefly and take a hallway stroll before making a pick. He’d reenter the room and make his announcement. Grousbeck called him “Michaelangelo at work.”
He motioned for Ainge to step outside the room for a private conversation.
“Go get another pick and get Rondo,” Grousbeck said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You love Rondo, he’s still there, so you should go back into the draft and get him.”
Grousbeck always said that he personally didn’t know how to scout players and find unknown talents. But he’d watched Ainge do that every year with the Celtics, so it felt right to give this one to him. This was back to his early venture capitalist days of finding someone to bet on. Ainge was that for him, and Rondo was that for Ainge.
After a few minutes, Ainge had an agreement with his old friends in Phoenix at number twenty-one: The Suns would select Rondo there, and the Celtics would send them one of their extra first-rounders, this one a 2007 first they’d gotten from Cleveland when the Cavs, surprisingly, gave up that capital for Jiri Welsch. The Celtics believed they’d acquired a gem with Rondo. All Rivers had to do was figure out how to distribute minutes and turn the team over to two young point men whose combined age still didn’t match Rivers’s. They still had a lot to learn.
Kevin McHale also made a trade involving his first-round pick, but it was one that he wanted to undo as soon as he agreed to it. His first move, selecting a guard named Brandon Roy, was a solid one. Roy’s talent was obvious, but so were his chronic knee problems. Based on talent alone, he would have gone in the top three. The knee concerns turned him into a bit of a slider. No one would have criticized McHale if he had chosen Roy and stopped.
But that pick was connected to another one he had in place with Houston, picking at number eight. Houston was going to take a player, Foye, there and send him and guard Luther Head to the Wolves. Easy deal. Foye just had to make it to the eighth slot for it to be executed. When Foye was taken by the Blazers with the pick they got from the Celtics at seven, the deal collapsed. That led to one of the strangest agreements of McHale’s career. He traded the just-drafted Roy, pick six, for the just-drafted Foye, pick seven.
Roy for Foye.
Six for seven.
Taking a player you don’t want at six and then trading for the player you wanted all along—and didn’t take—who went at seven.
It wasn’t unusual for teams to make pre-draft trades. It was unusual for those trades to comically disintegrate. The only other part of the deal was $1 million going from Portland to Minnesota. There was no other way to put it. The deal stunk for the Wolves. They essentially took $1 million to go back a space. It was not an encouraging draft night for Garnett, who had one more year on his contract.
There was similar tension in Seattle. It was much bigger than draft choices and front-office moves, although those weren’t good, either. Rather, it was about the threat of an actual franchise move. The local ownership group was called the Basketball Club of Seattle and was led by Howard Schultz (of Starbucks fame). Schultz wanted to update and expand KeyArena, and he wanted $220 million of the public’s money to do it.
The voters and city weren’t interested in that plan, so Schultz eventually sold the team to Oklahoma City businessman Clay Bennett. Part of the agreement with Bennett was that he would operate in good faith to find an arena in or around Seattle before doing what many Sonics fans feared.
But that was fall and winter business. In the summer, in the draft, the Sonics selected a twenty-year-old center from Senegal, Mouhamed Sene. Their first-round pick from the previous draft was a twenty-year-old center from France, Johan Petro. The names and countries changed; the ages and positions didn’t.
From Boston to Minneapolis to Seattle, there was a similar concern. The veteran players spoke the language of urgency and desperation, and they wanted proof that they were being heard.
Garnett was so frustrated after the draft that he bypassed all diplomacy and got right to the issue in an interview with Slam magazine: “One thing that I can’t stand is if I’m working hard and the organization upstairs isn’t working hard, it’s not fair. It’s not fair to me. That’s not fair to a person who’s actually trying to get a championship. I feel like when it works is when both sides are just as active and as hungry. I just wish the Minnesota Timberwolves would work a little harder, or work as hard as I work in the summertime.”
The type of executive that Garnett described was not fictional. In fact, Ainge and McHale knew him and had charmed NBA careers because of him. His name was Arnold Auerbach, known in the basketball world and beyond as Red.
Garnett would have loved Red, who was always orchestrating something that wasn’t supposed to happen. He’d been doing that since the early days of the league, when the NBA’s players were all white and he decided that they shouldn’t be: In 1950, he drafted Chuck Cooper, the first black player in the NBA. Six years later, he maneuvered his way to the top of the draft so he could get to his desired destination, acquiring Bill Russell. He selected the center, built the Celtics around him, and set a professional sports record with eight consecutive championships.
Red could read a room.
After that eighth straight title, and his ninth overall, he decided to retire from coaching and work in the front office. He named Russell as his replacement, reasoning that the only coach who could reach Russell was Russell himself. The move was a historic one, as Russell became the first black coach in all of pro sports.
Red could hustle you.
After Russell retired following the 1969 championship season, the Celtics suddenly had a hole at center for the first time since the 1950s. Red scouted Dave Cowens at Florida State and walked out of the gym in mock disgust before the game ended. People thought Red hated him; it was all a ruse so there was a clearer path to drafting him. He did that in 1970 and watched Cowens become an MVP and two-time champion.
Red could work the system.
He had two first-round picks in 1978, at six and eight, and he wanted to draft Larry Bird with that first selection. An Indiana State junior, Bird was eligible to be drafted because his original class began college four years earlier. Bird, though, dropped out of Indiana University and then resumed his career at State. He was a year behind in class but available to NBA teams who were willing to wait a year for him and unafraid to risk losing him to the 1979 draft if they didn’t get a deal done in time. The deal got done.
Two years later, Red had an arrangement with Golden State in which he gave up the number one overall draft pick, along with pick thirteen, in exchange for the Warriors’ third pick and center Robert Parish. With that third choice, he took the University of Minnesota’s Kevin McHale.
There it was, in a savvy two-year whirlwind: the birth of the original Big Three.
It was a different league then. No salary cap. No lucrative TV partnership. No use of analytics. In that league, Bird was the highest-paid rookie in history at $625,000 per year. There was no methodical hoarding of picks with the big reveal coming at the end of year three or four. No, with Red, the reveal came with the announcement of what he’d pulled off. You got a chance immediately to applaud the genius of it all.
Ainge the executive could now appreciate things that Ainge the player could not. What Red did, from traditional acquisitions to creative ones—like his deal to get Ainge in 1981—was brilliant. And difficult. When Ainge told him years later that he would have broken up the Big Three, it was a good line but based on no insight on how to actually get a deal done. The job was much harder than the ever-smirking, cigar-chomping Red made it look. He appeared to be at ease in everything, which the Celtics learned when they tried to collect all sixteen of the organization’s championship trophies. Red had casually stored one in a home closet.
One thing Red could not do was outrace time. He was ailing just before the start of the season, and in October, he died of a heart attack. He was eighty-nine. Red Auerbach was the Celtics. Years after he worked his whistle in practices and squeezed his rolled-up programs during games, he gave the Celtics a fighting spirit that many of those teams didn’t naturally have. Once, when he was in his late seventies, Red was challenged to a game of racquetball by twenty-eight-year-old Celtic Dee Brown.
“I’ll win this one, Red,” Brown teased.
“Wanna bet?” the older man replied. “I’ll kick your ass.”
That was his solution to a lot of things. Outsmart ’em and then kick their ass. But while he was around to see plenty of Celtics lows in his life, he died before he could see his beloved franchise at its lowest. There were so many areas where his presence, his experience, could have helped.
As Rivers entered his third season as head coach, he was struggling personally. He’d kept his home in Orlando while working in Boston. He flew back to Florida as often as he could, taking advantage of breaks in the schedule to see one of his three sons play basketball or to watch his only daughter play volleyball. He missed the mundane, just being nearby for the ordinariness of family life.
Red knew about that, too. In all his years coaching and leading the Celtics, he hadn’t moved his family to Boston, either. The Auerbachs were based in Washington, DC, while their father lived for years in Boston’s Lenox Hotel. As long as the team was winning, which it was when Red coached, no one cared.
Ainge, showing some of Red’s insight, knew exactly how to relieve some of the pressure on Rivers. Unlike Red, Rivers was not going to win often in the 2006–2007 season. Ainge was sure of it.
He wanted to spread the message to the entire ownership group so no one got the wrong idea about what the franchise faced. Ainge, Rivers, Grousbeck, Pags, Bob Epstein, and several limited partners were invited to play at Turner Hill Golf Club in Ipswich, Massachusetts. After golf, the group gathered in a large room for dinner.
“All right, before we get started, I want everyone to write on a piece of paper how many wins we’re going to have this year,” Ainge announced.
Several people began writing their predictions. Ainge read some of them off—fifty, forty-five, forty—and made another statement after looking over several of the slips: “I have to tell you, this is some of the most unrealistic stuff I’ve seen in a while. We’re not going to be good this year, guys. We’re going to struggle. We’re going to play hard; we’re going to be well coached. But we’re young, and it’s going to be hard for us.”
It was that kind of message and the support around it that was missing from many talk shows, columns, fan sites, and arena seats. During a 24-point home loss to the Knicks in November, Rivers looked behind the bench and saw a couple of homemade signs. “Fire Doc,” they read. Just in case he wasn’t reading them, the signs grew voices late in the game, and there was a chant. “Fire Doc… Fire Doc.” The Celtics were 4–8 after beginning the season 1–6. The critics had no idea that what they were watching, by comparison, was as good as the season would get.
Before one game, Grousbeck approached a fan holding a sign critical of Ainge and Rivers. The fan, a young teen sitting a few rows behind the Celtics’ bench, didn’t know who the owner was.
“What’s your sign say?” Grousbeck asked.
“It says, ‘Fire Doc and Danny.’”
“Why do you want to do that?”
“Because they’re idiots,” the kid replied.
“Well, I’d prefer that you didn’t have the sign. I really wish you’d put it away.”
“Too bad.”
“What if I told you that I know the person who assigns seats? And I can get that person to move your seats to the balcony?”
“Never mind, then.”
And the sign went away. But the removal of tangible signs, in Boston and elsewhere, didn’t change fan anger and resentment.
The figurative signs were there for all to see in Seattle. In a gesture that appeared to be gracious, new Sonics owner Clay Bennett invited Ray Allen to play golf with him. They went to Newcastle, on the city’s east side; spent five hours together on the links; and talked all things NBA. They discussed players, coaches, facility upgrades, and the community in which they lived. Or the community in which Allen lived.
Allen came away impressed that Bennett had reached out to him, shared so much, and listened. But what that session amounted to was consulting for Bennett. None of his investors had Seattle ties, and there was nothing in his actions that suggested he was committed to the community. Everything seemed like a warm-up to Oklahoma City.
In Boston, at the beginning of 2007, the results were numbing. Pierce hurt his left foot and was diagnosed with a stress fracture. This was troubling. Pierce had already missed eight games, and the team was 2–6 without him.
Each time a Celtics game was played, a new crack was revealed. The revelation was always paired with a loss. Not sometimes; always. They weren’t blowout losses. One by 9, another by 8, this one by 5, yet another by 4. They kept adding up as Pierce watched, surprised and helpless. He thought they needed him, obviously. What he didn’t realize was that they weren’t able to collectively claw their way to wins without him.
No one had the maturity, yet, to salvage a possession by drawing a foul when the jump shot wasn’t there. They didn’t know the art of tactfully working the officials (“Good call, Tony… watch him on that illegal screen…”). No one had the confidence to see it as his team when Pierce wasn’t there. Some of them, like the kid Rondo, were just starting to ascend. He was competitive and cocky, with a sprinter’s legs and a quarterback’s vision. But a rookie couldn’t get them out of this. Al Jefferson could score and rebound, and at times he made it look easy. If he kept working, he could make an All-Star team one day. The center from Ainge’s first draft class, twenty-two-year-old Kendrick Perkins, was ever capable of delivering that ass-kicking that Red liked to see his big men give. But where do you start the fight when, after a loss in Toronto on January 26, the losing streak is at ten?
Ainge made sure the fight wasn’t going to start in the locker room. He knew that his young team might be listening to media speculation about the future of the team or of their head coach. Leon Powe was in the weight room when Ainge walked in to remind players what wasn’t going to happen: “I’m not firing Doc. I’m not getting rid of the staff. Don’t listen to any of that stuff. Just keep playing hard.”
He also encouraged Rivers as the losses began to pile up. At times, Rivers wanted to pull his hat down and not walk around Boston. Ainge tried to accept blame and explain that he had given Rivers “Volkswagens to race against Maseratis.” He told his coach what a great job he was doing and how he could see individual players getting better. Rivers believed it and tried to stay positive through it, but any type of optimism was fleeting.
The fans’ calls for Rivers’s firing began to quiet and not because they suddenly appreciated him. All the losing had changed the focus, and now a benefit to it was in view. College basketball had two dominant players, Greg Oden at Ohio State and Kevin Durant at Texas, and they were seen as the clear prizes at the top of the 2007 draft. If the Celtics continued to lose, they’d be bad enough to significantly increase their lottery chances.
Three more games to close out January, and they were numbers eleven, twelve, and thirteen in a row. Incredible. Rivers was commuting between Florida and Massachusetts for this? He heard those voices from three years ago. Don’t take that job, smart people told him. It’ll make you look bad. They appeared to be right.
It was crazy. The Celtics’ games, broadcast regionally on Comcast SportsNet, were showing audience growth as the streak continued. The fans cheered for losses. They wanted entertainment, effort, and a close loss. They lost numbers fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen straight with familiar breakdowns. After sixteen, against the advice of Rivers, Pierce returned. His left foot was healed enough, and he’d already missed twenty-four games. It was time to play.
His presence against the Nets, a rival from the competitive days, didn’t affect the streak. These days, the Nets weren’t very good, at 23–27, but they were more composed than the Celtics and won by 14. What the Celtics needed to stop this madness was a game against themselves.
They got the closest thing to that on February 11 in Minneapolis. It was the current Celtics from Boston against all those ex-Celtics on the Timberwolves. The Wolves were on their second coach of the season, Randy Wittman, and their fourth in two years. The Celtics hadn’t won a game in thirty-seven days.
Garnett was upset that national commentators, essentially, told the truth. Doug Collins, Charles Barkley, Reggie Miller, and Kenny Smith all made remarks that amounted to this: KG has got to get out of Minnesota. He’s never going to win there. It was true, and Garnett knew it. He tried to take the high road in a response to them and redirected commentary back at them.
“They ought to have a drug test before they let some of these people on TV, man. Alcohol tests, see their levels. Everybody has to blow in a Breathalyzer test before you can get on TV.”
Pierce and Garnett couldn’t change their approach. Even on teams like these, in games like this, they played as if this mattered. Pierce’s left foot looked fine as he drove to the basket and hit quick pull-ups. Garnett played like he did in his MVP season, commanding every inch of the court in a forceful display of all-around excellence. Pierce had 29 points in thirty-one minutes. Garnett had 26 points, 11 rebounds, and 10 assists: a triple-double.
The Celtics lost again. Eighteen in a row. It was the longest streak in team history. When they came out of it, finally, in a 20-point win over the Bucks, they were 13–38. There wasn’t any aspect of positive thinking, analytics, or big-picture philosophy that could reframe how wretched that victory desert had been.
That is, unless you lived in Seattle.
Every month, there were new clues that the Sonics were leaving town. Fans there knew the team needed a makeover, but at least the flawed team was theirs. It was maddening that every piece of news that came out about the team seemed to be setting up a departure.
Team president Wally Walker was already out, and general manager Rick Sund wasn’t expected to stay for long. By March, Allen was out for the year with bone spurs in both ankles.
If there was one thing the relatively connected trio of Garnett, Pierce, and Allen had, it was certainty. They could all look back now to their respective draft nights and smile about the pageantry of it all. Garnett had just turned nineteen, fresh out of high school. Allen and Pierce were twenty, with three years of college behind them. It was their first official NBA introduction, the beginning stage of a lifelong dream.
The idea was never to stay the same as a player or as a person. In the spring of 2007, thirty-year-old Allen could confidently stand up for Seattle in ways that a twenty-year-old Allen couldn’t. Garnett, at thirty, could make demands of a franchise while a nineteen-year-old Garnett would have asked permission. Pierce, at thirty, thought like a team-builder; at twenty, he was a passenger who just wanted to prove himself to the team.
After a decade of either waiting to be drafted or seeing whom their team would draft, it was time for a change. The next time the public saw all three of their franchises, it would be back at lottery headquarters for another made-for-TV production. Representatives would be there with awkward smiles and crossed fingers, hoping that yet two more kids, nineteen-year-olds Oden and Durant, could save a team.
The trio had outgrown this. The Lottery Show was programming for kids. One way or another, these men were going to change the course of their careers while they still had the equity to do it. They were going to keep talking and questioning and pushing until they finally found themselves in a better situation. They knew that was going to happen. They just never imagined that it was about to happen for all three of them together.