That day’s business meeting in Phoenix was supposed to be a simple one. The plan in the spring of 2003 was for Danny Ainge to go to Sky Harbor International Airport in the morning, personally pick up a friend arriving from Boston at eleven o’clock, and eventually recommend some candidates for an executive position.
They’d get in a round of golf, with tee time scheduled for one thirty. Go over some dynamic names. Have dinner. Easy.
Ainge was perfect for assignments like these. Not only did he have an abundance of contacts and opinions, but he was also an expert on the topic: pro basketball—specifically, the Boston Celtics.
His friend was Steve Pagliuca, one of the Celtics’ new co- owners. Months earlier, Pagliuca, Wyc Grousbeck, Bob Epstein, and several partners had paid more for the Celtics, $360 million, than anyone had paid for a team in NBA history. That was 2002. Pagliuca and Grousbeck, longtime and excitable Boston fans, spoke publicly of bringing championship basketball to the city; in private, to confidants like Ainge, they confessed that they wanted to hire a championship team-builder, too.
Pagliuca respected Ainge and liked the way he thought. The two of them attended the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, which Tiger Woods dominated with a 15-stroke victory. When they weren’t talking about golf as they walked the famed course, they discussed pro basketball. Pagliuca remembered those conversations when his group bought the Celtics, and he asked Ainge then to take the job. But Ainge was enjoying his life as a TV analyst. He turned Pagliuca down, but that didn’t stop them from joyfully debating basketball in the lounge of Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel, sometimes until one a.m., whenever Ainge was in New England.
The last great Celtics team, from 1986, included four Hall of Famers in the starting five: Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Dennis Johnson. The fifth starter was a six-foot-four guard named Ainge, born to be a gamesman. He could backflip off a diving board before he was five. Growing up in Oregon, he was the teenager who was All-State in three sports. He was twenty when he got three hits in his Major League Baseball debut, weeks after completing his sophomore year of college. When he returned to Brigham Young University as a junior, he earned all-conference and All-American. In basketball. He became a Celtic at twenty-two. He won his first Boston title at twenty-five.
It was hard to pin down Ainge precisely as just one thing all the time. He’d touched all sides of the basketball business. By the time he retired in 1995, he’d played in six NBA Finals. Been an All-Star. Been traded. Traveled with and teased by Bird. Tangled with and taunted by Michael Jordan. He was the prankster who became a coach, briefly, and won 70 percent of his games in his first full season. He’d done national TV, too: an analyst who wasn’t partial to his era of ball. He was no in my day type. He often praised modern players and took mythology away from ones he’d traded elbows with. In fact, he once scolded his boss, basketball deity Red Auerbach, at a Christmas party in 1988. He looked around the room and saw his best friend, McHale, limping. He pointed to Bird’s surgically repaired feet. He shook his head and told Auerbach, the sport’s original front-office genius, “I’d trade these guys.”
Pagliuca knew Ainge wouldn’t give him convenient clichés. The ownership group wanted names of elite team-builders. What’s the point of spending all that money if you don’t have a creative visionary making basketball decisions? Ainge promised to help.
When Pagliuca arrived in Phoenix, he saw Ainge waiting for him outside. The owner got into Ainge’s gray Ford Taurus, and as they began to drive, it was clear that their original plan was being tweaked. Pagliuca and Ainge were supposed to meet with a candidate, and the three of them would play golf and talk about the Celtics job. But Ainge wasn’t hurried.
“Let’s drive for a while,” he told Pagliuca. “We’ve got some time. You know, I’ve given a lot of thought to this…”
Ainge was trying to get to a point, and it was that he knew the perfect man for the job that Pagliuca had flown hours to discuss.
Him.
That was his recommendation. He could be the one to go back to Boston, twenty-two years after he first stepped on the court there, to make a series of bold basketball decisions. When he stopped coaching, he and his wife, Michelle, had six kids at home, and he needed to spend more time there. But now three of the six were out of the house, and Michelle was open to the idea of a Boston return.
As for Ainge’s decisions, frankly, many of them might confuse people, in and out of the office. Some people would be confused due to their own assumptions. For example, in Boston, the story naturally could be positioned as a sentimental homecoming. But that wasn’t quite it. He wasn’t invested in the 1980s or in the way the Celtics typically did business, and not even in what Auerbach imagined as the best way to win again. If anything, he was attached to social experiments. He’d do it to his friends all the time with the intention of getting to some pure, objective truth.
He’d take an indefensible position on something he didn’t believe just to see if you’d buy the indefensibility. Because if you did, well, maybe it meant that you could be swayed too easily. Or that you don’t want to argue with him just because he played in the NBA and you didn’t. He certainly wasn’t that guy. Either way, he was always trying to sniff out that personality type because that in itself was an obstacle to improvement.
If he took that job in Boston, there’d have to be some firm principles.
There could be no player or topic protected from analytical scrutiny.
There could be no quick acceptance of so-called basketball truisms without a challenge.
There could be no exasperation or hopelessness about how hard it is to scout unrealized talent, recruit and coach known talent, manage the salary cap, and ultimately win in pro basketball.
That last one is where many NBA executives lose their spirit.
The contemporary player has been scouted since he was a high school freshman, and a general manager must have some sense of who that player projects to be by the time he’s nineteen or twenty. Even so, that player’s motivations might change when given guaranteed millions and international attention. For those who find talent, develop and expertly coach it, the heartbreak is sometimes crass and sudden: The talent might want to play elsewhere, in a better city, for a better team, or leave simply in the name of change. It wasn’t that way in the 1980s for several reasons, and intelligent team-builders understand that they don’t have time to rant about it. Too much looking back will get you fired.
From the outside looking in, Boston was just fine. The Celtics won forty-nine games in the 2001–2002 season and advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals. When Pagliuca made his trip to Phoenix to visit with Ainge, the 2002–2003 Celtics were back in the playoffs again, headed toward the Eastern Conference Semifinals. The fans weren’t asking for a change. The players were content. Things were comfortable.
But Ainge, then forty-four years old, had matured from gamesman to strategist. His TV listeners could hear his discomfort when he analyzed Celtics games. You could see it on screen, underneath the half smile for the benefit of the cameras. Real basketball observers were not fooled; he wasn’t impressed with the Celtics. He didn’t believe that they were anywhere close to winning a championship.
They were stuck: too good to be bad and not good enough to be great. There was only so far they could go as they were, so the trick for Ainge was to do what had never been done in his life. He was to inherit a situation, temporarily make it worse, and then rise from that subterranean point to the top of the industry.
This would be tougher than that magic he pulled in the spring of 1981. Then, he and two future NBA players from BYU were up against six future NBA players from Notre Dame. They trailed by 1 point with eight seconds to play. Ainge got the ball and was on the move fast. He dribbled with his right hand past John Paxson, then went behind his back to elude Kelly Tripucka and another defender. He’d blown up a triple-team in four seconds. He was college basketball’s player of the year and an academic All-American. It was obvious. He was fast but not frantic, smarts blurring perfectly with style and cool urgency. He was in the lane now, with a slow-footed center named Tim Andree in front of him and an athletic six-foot-nine forward, Orlando Woolridge, close by. It took him a second and a half to get there. He had time for one more left-to-right switch, and the right was a beauty: a soft finger roll over Woolridge. Ainge hadn’t been great that game, but it didn’t matter. He dribbled BYU to a win.
Ainge was outnumbered, and Ainge prevailed.
This would be tougher than the fall of 1981. He’d picked the wrong pro sport, baseball, and he knew it. He wasn’t even hitting .200. The best thing he could say about the year was that as a third baseman, he got to stand next to shortstop Alfredo Griffin, who was on his way to being the American League’s Rookie of the Year. At the end of May and the first week and a half of June, his Toronto Blue Jays lost eleven games in a row. Then baseball went on strike. The basketball team that drafted him, the Celtics, had lost ten games combined in all of March, April, and May. Then it won the NBA title. This wasn’t working. He told the Jays that he didn’t want to play baseball anymore and that he’d return their signing bonus money. He thought their soothing words equaled a verbal release from the contract; the Jays disagreed. They took him to court, and the court agreed with them. But he still got out of the contract and joined the Celtics.
Ainge took on an entire baseball franchise, and Ainge somehow prevailed.
This would be tougher, more humbling, than the winter of 1997. He was back in Boston as head coach of the Phoenix Suns. He had a frustrated player, Robert Horry, who wasn’t playing well, and the player took out his frustration on him. Horry threw a towel in the coach’s face as he walked back to the bench. Why do that to him in Boston, of all places? In front of his people? Embarrassing. But less than a week later, Horry was traded, and Ainge remained on the bench.
Ainge didn’t agree with a player, and the player had to leave. How many times does that happen in the NBA?
This task was going to take something new. In the previous ones, he was left with things in his hands, literally and figuratively, and he had to make a good choice. With the basketball. With baseball. With, remarkably, the towel. In Boston, he had to create a winning plan and then sell it to groups with competing agendas: players, coaches, fans, media, ownership. Some of the people he’d sell it to knew that, long term, they wouldn’t be around if a championship parade ever were to happen.
Ainge said he was intrigued by the job, and Pagliuca, a man who had presided over multiple billion-dollar deals at his private investment firm, thought he knew what that meant: Ainge really wanted the job. Pags, as everyone called him, started thinking about how excited his ownership group would be with this development. Pags, Ainge, and the would-be candidate played golf for five hours that day, and then it was time for two of them to think about reshaping the Celtics.
When he was a gamesman in his twenties, Ainge played with teammates who were known as the Big Three. As a strategist in his forties, his mission was to find the updated version of it. Pags and the owners liked Ainge’s chances because of the way he blended the old and new eras of basketball. They soon found out, as they negotiated a contract with him, that he had a lot more than basketball instincts. They were composed dealmakers, and so was he. And he was using his skills on them.
The owners wanted his first-year salary to be $2 million. Ainge said it should be $3 million. The owners kept talking with him over the next two weeks and going up incrementally—$2.1 million, $2.3 million, $2.5 million. Ainge had something else in mind, and he was determined to get it. He wasn’t trying to be the highest-paid team-builder in the NBA or get to a number that someone could proudly leak to the media. He didn’t care about any of that. This really was about him as an evaluator and negotiator. This was their first opportunity to see him work up close, to see how he placed a value on something—in this case, himself—and how he got the result he wanted.
As they negotiated with him over two weeks, they noticed what was happening. Pags and Grousbeck were venture capitalists, a position that Grousbeck summed up as “finding people to believe in and bet on.” They’d found one, and he was already at work. Ainge remained firm and patient with them, yet the numbers from their side continued to rise: $2.6 million, $2.7 million, $2.8 million…
Auerbach, then eighty-five years old, had already told the new owners that Ainge was lucky, and the wise man winked when he said it. He knew that you could create a mess for Ainge, and somehow he’d find a way to sort it out and make it better.
That was his task in Boston. Pags and Grousbeck had negotiated with him, and he’d finally accepted their final offer to take the job. His first-year salary was $3 million.