Two weeks into his new job, Brad Stevens didn’t know what to expect from the league that he’d just signed up for. He’d returned from summer league ball in Orlando, and now he was in suburban Waltham, Massachusetts, trying to figure out how to be a pro coach. And whom to coach.
He and one of his assistants, Ron Adams, stood in the Celtics’ training facility and looked at each other. What now?
Doc Rivers, Paul Pierce, and Kevin Garnett had been traded. Everyone else on the roster expected to be traded. And the Celtics’ most treasured valuables were historical banners above the court and future draft picks inside of a mythical vault.
Stevens understood it was going to be a long year and that the season would rough him up efficiently; he was almost guaranteed to lose more games in his first six months here than the forty-nine he had lost in his entire six-year head-coaching run at Butler. His understanding of that, and his trust in Danny Ainge’s methodology, gave him an advantage over Jim O’Brien, the first coach Ainge inherited in 2003. But O’Brien’s advantage was that he’d been in the league for a while. Stevens, the first-year coach, had to learn everything.
“I’ll never forget spending the first month realizing that I couldn’t teach the defense that was so good for us at Butler,” Stevens says. “It didn’t fit our team. And it didn’t work in the NBA. It gets you spread out, and you can’t guard the three-point line. Our big men at the time never would have been able to play that way; they were bigger guys, so they had to be more back and protecting the paint.
“So I had to teach myself a defense I’d never taught, and I’m teaching myself this with Ron Adams every day. Then there’s coaching in the NBA for the first time, when you know the big question is going to be, ‘Can this college guy make it in the pros or not?’ And you know, I’m thinking about things like where our body position is when we close out. I’m losing sleep for two weeks in freakin’ August about that. Luckily, I learned that it’s not that big of a deal. You figure it out as time goes on.”
Stevens had already learned the most important thing he needed to know about the Celtics at his mother’s kitchen table in Zionsville, Indiana. There, in July 2013, Ainge reaffirmed his belief in coaching stability. He was willing to be patient if Stevens was.
When Stevens agreed, he soon discovered why no one was ever bored or static in the ever-shifting transactional world of the Celtics.
The first clue of that actually happened in Orlando at the summer league, but few people paid attention to the detail. At the last minute, the Celtics tweaked the margins of their giant trade with Brooklyn. They included a player named D. J. White, who played twenty-eight minutes the previous season, in the deal. His inclusion increased Boston’s trade exception from $7 million to $10 million.
Somehow, that deal helper would be useful for them later.
As Stevens learned on the job and piled up losses, fifty-seven of them, the legendary players he’d heard so much about were settling in to Brooklyn. The sight of KG and Pierce in the black and white of the Nets was jarring enough. Beyond that, it was clear that the championship aspirations of Brooklyn were a bit of a reach.
The Nets were a good team, not great, and they finished with forty-four wins. They were affected by injuries to two of their top three players, Deron Williams and Brook Lopez. They also didn’t get what they expected from Pierce, thirty-six, and Garnett, thirty-seven.
KG was never about the numbers, but it was the first time in his career he didn’t average double digits in scoring. Pierce was good, but he found himself looking for some of the younger players to elevate the Nets—and they in turn looked at him as if he were that guy. The team did win its first-round series before being eliminated by a familiar and hated—to two of them, at least—opponent: the Miami Heat. LeBron James was especially devastating against his mouthy rival, Pierce. He averaged 30 points and seemingly couldn’t miss from the field.
But that wasn’t the big story of the playoffs. That was happening in Los Angeles with Doc Rivers’s new team, the Clippers.
The team’s owner, Donald Sterling, made several racist remarks that were recorded by his girlfriend. When the recordings became public during the Clippers’ playoff series against the Warriors, the entire league responded with anger, shock, and protest. Some players discussed a boycott; some Clippers employees, of all racial backgrounds, were embarrassed to work for the team.
Rivers knew that going to work for the Clippers would be challenging, but he didn’t realize Sterling’s problems were as deep-seated as those tapes revealed. Since Rivers was seen as personable and stable, people looked to him to resolve a variety of issues during the crisis. After he spent part of one day trying to uplift the spirits of employees who didn’t work in basketball operations, he got into his car and made a call.
Adam Silver, the new NBA commissioner, once told Rivers to call if he ever needed anything. Well, he needed him at that moment. The organization was crumbling. He explained to Silver how bad the situation was and how, with the Clippers, he’d become the unintended spokesman.
Silver assured him that he was doing a great job and that things would change soon.
They would not change before Rivers’s players heard him, before a playoff game in Oakland, screaming at someone on the phone before the game. He was admonishing the team’s president, Andy Roeser, not to bring Sterling to the game. Even after the release of the controversial tapes, Sterling was at the San Francisco airport en route to see the Clippers.
“Are you crazy?” Rivers’s players could hear him say. “Do not—and I want to make myself clear on this—do not have Donald come to this game!”
They went back and forth so long, and so animatedly, that Rivers didn’t take his seat on the bench until a minute before tip-off. In the end, Sterling didn’t come to the game. Nor did he keep his team much longer. At the end of April, Silver made a stunning announcement.
“I am banning Mr. Sterling for life from any association with the Clippers organization or the NBA,” Silver said. He fined him $2.5 million and said he was going to force him to sell the team. The commissioner said he was also “particularly grateful” for the leadership shown by Rivers.
In June 2014, the Celtics had their first opportunity to use a Brooklyn first-round pick. It followed their own selection, at six, of six-foot-four guard Marcus Smart. At seventeen, Boston drafted another guard, Kentucky’s James Young. It was also trade and free agent season in the NBA. Pierce left Brooklyn to sign a two-year contract with Washington; LeBron James returned to Cleveland four years after The Decision; and the Celtics, on the strength of the salary-cap exception they received in the Brooklyn trade, were able to acquire guard Marcus Thornton, center Tyler Zeller, and a future first-round pick from the Cavaliers.
Ainge and Mike Zarren were just getting loose. They made deals aggressively, always looking for the slightest positive in an acquisition that would be good for something one day. In their latest trade, they were able to absorb the full salary of Thornton because they tucked it, so to speak, into the salary-cap exception space. The draft-pick vault was filling up to eye level, but the players still came in and out, transfer-station style.
That couldn’t have been clearer to anyone watching two months into Stevens’s second year. His career record on December 17, 2014, was 34–71. It would have been easy for anyone to look at that record, without context, and say that whatever Stevens was doing was not working. Ainge saw beauty in it.
“So Danny is this nasty competitor, right?” Stevens says with a laugh. “You go back and watch his games. He’s chucking balls at people. On the golf course, he’s relentless; he’ll take anybody’s money that will go out there with him. But nobody is more of a glass half full, optimistic person than Danny Ainge. I’d be down in the dumps, we’d get beaten by twenty, and he’d call and say, ‘Man, I saw some good things out there.’”
Ainge usually saw good things and trade opportunities. On December 18, 2014, he traded one of his favorite players—and people—ever in Rajon Rondo. He sent him to Dallas in exchange for a bundle of players, including forward Jae Crowder and yet another first-round pick. Rondo’s new coach would be Rick Carlisle, a reserve guard on the championship Big Three Celtics of 1986.
With Rondo gone, Ainge couldn’t stop in January 2015. He moved his leading scorer, Jeff Green, to Memphis as part of a three-team trade. One of the pieces he got back, of course, was a future first-round pick. There was also a kid in the trade, one he’d watched grow up. It was Austin Rivers. But he wasn’t going to stay long, either. Ainge traded Rivers to the Clippers, to play for his father.
In February 2015, at the deadline, there were even more trades. The Nets sent KG back to Minnesota to end his career there. Just nineteen months after the Brooklyn-Boston deal, the Celtics had yet to get into the meat of their picks, and the Nets already were left with nothing to show from doing business with Boston. The Celtics were spending from all parts of that trade. That’s how they acquired Thornton and Zeller from Cleveland. So just before the deadline, they traded Thornton and that Cleveland first-rounder they’d received and brought in a five-foot-nine guard, Isaiah Thomas.
They were excited by their new guard.
Carlisle, Rondo’s coach, was already sick of his.
Rondo got himself benched by Carlisle after he wouldn’t listen to the coach’s play call. They’d yelled at one another in front of the bench, on display for all to see. Rondo was in his contract year, and there was a good chance he wouldn’t re-sign with the Mavericks.
On March 1, 2015, Stevens’s team was 23–34. But the Celtics finished 17–8 and made the playoffs. The new player, nicknamed IT, was sensational. He found his game playing for Stevens, and he became the team’s top scorer.
Stevens, unquestionably, was a pro coach. He’d been able to make a team out of a group that Ainge had never intended to be a team. He was making trades for assets, so that brought an eclectic bunch of players to Boston. The fact that Stevens was able to take those odd fits and spare parts and forge a traceable identity was miraculous.
“It’s not much different from when you have a young rookie who you know is going to be a fantastic player, but he’s not going to be a fantastic player in his rookie year,” Ainge says. “It’s going to take some learning. And I knew that about Brad. Coaching is hard, and coaching in the NBA is even harder. I knew that we didn’t have a great team and I was very open and honest with him about all of those things.
“I think Brad is one of the top coaches in the NBA right now. And I think that he’s getting better every year. He’s going to be even better five years from now. It’s funny: From his standpoint, he thinks there were some definite growing pains when he first started. But not from mine. I knew he wasn’t perfect as a coach, but I knew he was good, and he has been good from day one. But now I think he’s one of the better coaches in the league.”
In 2016, a few notable things took shape. After twenty-two seasons, KG retired. Pierce wasn’t far behind. He’d played for Rivers and the Clippers in ’16 and planned to extend his career one more year. The Celtics had become good again, winners of forty-eight games. Their leading scorer, and All-Star, was Thomas. As warm as that story was for the franchise, the development in Brooklyn was staggering.
The Nets were awful. Really bad. They won twenty-one games and were headed to the lottery. The trade had put them on a treadmill that would take them a couple of years to escape; they’d be bad enough to enter the lottery, but because of the trade, they couldn’t improve from those lottery picks. Those were for the Celtics to use.
In the 2016 draft, with the third choice via Brooklyn, the Celtics took California forward Jaylen Brown. Red Auerbach had been right about Ainge. How lucky was this? The rebuild lasted one year, and now they were a good team being gifted high draft picks. There was no pressure on Brown to lead the team because of what Ainge had done in the offseason.
He’d managed the salary cap well enough that there was enough room to pursue two prime free agents. One was Atlanta center Al Horford. The other was Oklahoma City forward Kevin Durant. The Celtics were one of the few teams who earned a one-on-one meeting with Durant in the Hamptons. They even brought his favorite football player, the Patriots’ Tom Brady, on the recruiting trip to sway him. Durant picked the Warriors instead. The Celtics continued their ascent and won fifty-three games. Thomas, who averaged 29 points, became the shortest All-NBA player in history.
Brooklyn? The Nets won twenty games. This was the 2017 draft, so it was the pick swap year insisted on by Wyc Grousbeck. No matter where the Nets landed in the lottery, there was no doubt that the Celtics, picking twenty-seventh, were going to swap with them. After the lottery balls bounced, the Nets finished with the number one overall selection.
Incredible. Ainge, who’d hoped the Brooklyn deal would lead to some decent late- to mid-first-round picks, acquired number three and number one in successive drafts. He knew the player he wanted with that pick, and it wasn’t Markelle Fultz, the consensus top choice. He had his eye on Duke forward Jayson Tatum. He realized he could still get Tatum and acquire a future first if he traded down from one to the three slot, held by the 76ers. The Sixers wanted Fultz, and the Lakers, choosing second, wanted guard Lonzo Ball. The Celtics added Tatum and said goodbye, officially, to the Truth.
Pierce signed a one-day contract and retired as a Celtic.
With one more Brooklyn pick in their care, the Celtics decided to cash in. They’d added forward Gordon Hayward in free agency, drafted Tatum, and now wanted another championship move. Cleveland guard Kyrie Irving requested a trade, and the luck of Ainge struck again. He had another Brooklyn pick to offer, and that was a valuable chip. It was going to be in the lottery, and it could be as high as the top three. He also had the benefit of insight. The Cavs’ former general manager was David Griffin, who used to work for Ainge in Phoenix. If anyone could tell him everything he needed to know about Irving, it was Griffin.
The deal was in motion, and the results from one of the most stunning transactions in league history were complete. The Celtics traded their veteran stars to Brooklyn and received the youth of James Young, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, and Kyrie Irving.
It all looked good in print, but Ainge, a lifelong Celtic, recognized the sacrifice necessary to be successful in green and white. He saw numerous examples of it in his playing and executive career. Rivers saw it, too, and summed it up by describing the 2008 version of KG.
“If you had never seen us play or practice that year, if all you knew about us was what you saw from the team plane, team meetings, interactions in our locker room, you would have thought that Kevin was a role-player.
“He was that player who basically said, ‘You can have my body, my brain, my talent. Use me as you see fit.’ He was special. He didn’t care about stats, ever. It was all about winning.”
It was why he looked so long at those rafters, delaying his first press conference by twenty-five minutes. All those players up there, with their numbers retired, weren’t there because of individual stats alone. They’d been honored because they played and thought a certain way.
In 2018, Pierce returned to the Garden and had his number retired while KG and Rondo watched. (Allen wasn’t there and instead tweeted a photo of himself and others at a previously scheduled golf event.) Later that year, Allen was inducted into the Hall of Fame. (Pierce and KG weren’t there.) In 2020, KG was inducted into the Hall and officially learned from the Celtics that his number, like Pierce’s, would also hang above Red Auerbach’s signed floor.
Allen still plays golf with Ainge and continues to have strong ties to New England. There are no plans for his number to hang above the court, even if what he, Pierce, and KG established on it is undeniable.