Can Danny?

To be fair, Danny Ainge deserves one more year. I know that might sound crazy coming from the guy who starts a site called Can Danny but it's true. When you look at it, it seems obvious that the fair thing to do would be to give Ainge one more offseason to make his plan come to fruition. He has spent four years collecting assets and is going to have Theo Ratliff's expiring deal to package them with. His brainchild has suffered injury and injury, which you can't hold against him. And his draft picks have panned out fairly well and are starting to mature. So yeah, in the interest of fairness, Danny deserves another year.

Unfortunately for Danny, the Celtics organization's concern shouldn't be "being fair", it should be "winning championships". While Danny's run into his fair share of bad luck, much of it, as Branch Rickey would attest, is the residue of his design. He's surrounded Paul Pierce with a team of might-be's and barely-were's so of course they are going to struggle when Pierce is out. Ainge has recently stated that he never planned on having so many young guys on the roster but no big trades have presented themselves over the last few years. Shouldn't this have been expected? While Danny has spent his many drafts on collecting assets instead of building a team, he's been picking in the mid-to-late first round, a place where you can find players but not anyone who's likely to have a ton of trade value. It's like saying that you are going to go out and sign a bunch of young role players and hope that a few of them pan out better than most people expect so you can then trade them for the players you REALLY want.

While the season hasn't gone as Ainge has planned, the reasons it hasn't were fairly evident from the outset.

Unfortunately, the ownership doesn't agree.

"You can't make a judgment on Danny right now," Pagliuca said. "It's only been four years. If Delonte [West] becomes [Mike] Bibby and Al Jefferson becomes Karl Malone, I'd say Danny has done pretty well."

This quote is distressing on many levels. Mr. Pagliuca has a legitimate point in saying that, due to Danny's go younger-than-young strategy, it's hard to judge the players he's brought in. That being said, the co-owner destroys any good will he might have coaxed from fans by making ridiculous comparisons such as Karl Malone and Mike Bibby. The capper, of course, is that even Pagliuca's delusions of grander (Malone, Bibby) don't have a championship.

The other thing that this overlooks is the logic of Danny Ainge's strategy to begin with. Maybe taking Paul Pierce's prime years and dropping them into a nursery school wasn't the best idea. Perhaps dealing for worse talent but more draft picks isn't the best way to give your superstar (and newly minted 2nd max contract player) a legitimate supporting class. Unfortunately, the ownership has an excuse for that as well. The Globe quoted Wyc Grousbeck as saying, "Most trades are sideways. I can take or leave them. They usually don't work out quite the way you hoped. I'm in favor of drafting and holding." That's basically my opinion on diets, Most of them don't change anything and don't work out. I'm in favor of changing to diet soda and not maintaining my current diet/lack of exercise.

So in the end, maybe the real reason why it's fair to give Ainge another shot is because he has a couple of imbeciles for bosses. I mean, if they are influencing the shots, nobody is going to be able to really put together a winner with them. Personally though, I'd like to think that a competent GM could talk sense into them, and at the very least not make the mistakes of Raef, Wally, Telfair, et al. While Danny might be able to turn things around, it's been his decisions that have helped drive this team deeper into the lottery. It might be nice to give him another shot but so far he's done nothing to actually deserve a last chance. This team needs to improve to be considered fair, so I don't see why being fair should be considered when dealing with the man who put the team together.