The draft that Danny Ainge built

The idea sounded so crazy no one would have predicted it, even though what happened was simply a holding pattern. I guess no one predicted that in 2047 Danny Ainge would still be general manager of the Boston Celtics either, but he is.

Of course, there were the sabbaticals. He spent the 2022 season in the Amazon, watching fire ants march back and forth over the jungle floor. He traced their movements in a journal, color-coding their departure and arrival times from the colony. After a torrent of rain, he described in excruciating detail the experience he had clinging to a rotten Euterpe precatoria trunk. With the bark disintegrating at his fingertips, he watched a living raft of fire ants float by on the river’s surface; thousands of ants clinging together for support; not a single worker more important than any other in the tangle of limbs preventing the queen from drowning. Having seen this spectacle Ainge decided to trade the number one pick from the 2023 draft to the Sacramento Kings for three future first round picks.

Each of those picks he also traded, as he continued to renew the Celtics core with solid but not spectacular players; the likes of Andre Drummond and Bradley Beal following in the footsteps of Al Horford, who had once signed with the team to much fanfare in the summer of 2016. Thus, Ainge avoided risking cap space on unproven quantities and still managed to keep Boston’s window open even after injuries forced Isiah Thomas into retirement by his 32nd birthday. At the time, critics lamented Ainge’s patience, citing the fact that his teams had yet to topple LeBron James from his throne atop the Eastern Conference. And yet, at the time, no one realized the magnitude of Ainge’s long game, that he was about to outlast everyone.

And that crazy idea? Well, after four decades of flipping picks for more picks, Ainge finally owns every pick in the draft. Everything begins and ends with his thought process. While Michael Jordan may have torched him in the 1980s and 1990s, the Alpha and the Omega are now simply A-I-N-G-E.

But what drives a man to such meticulous habits? The Taj Mahal only took two decades of sweat.

Some say it was a shrewd eye for talent. Others claim the man was simply waiting for that perfect wave to come in, when his roster was ripe and all the others rotten. Some say it was about principles and characters, about building the right way and not the wrong way. The truth is no one really knows the exigence for the strategy, only that the vision became a reality. Oh, there are rumors aplenty. Laboratory research and bloodrite rituals. Prayer flags and Sherpas. Ex-employees of the Boston franchise even claim that Ainge neither enters nor exits the team’s facilities via public thresholds or daylight hours. He is not so much a man, but a digital presence. He is a reclusive answer to a Star Wars hologram. He is the shadow lurking behind the blinds of the owner’s suite.

At the start of the century’s fourth decade, he took trips to the polar ice caps, or what was left of them. And, interestingly enough, the first time Ainge opted to trade the number one pick in the draft was in the same week major news outlets reported: “Scientists stunned by Antarctic rainfall and a melt area bigger than Texas.” That year Ainge traded the number one pick in the 2017 draft to the Philadelphia 76ers. They selected Markelle Fultz and their young core would torment Boston for a decade. But Ainge never worried. He was operating by a different set of rules. And now that young core is no more, and he is still calling the shots in Boston.

In a rare interview, Ainge spoke about that trip to the poles: “We sat there on the ocean, where the Ross Ice Shelf used to be, and I kept thinking there has to be something else.” He made these comments a week before LeBron James coached his son Bronny James to a win over the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals. Those close to Ainge who have been willing to break their boss’ silence say it was that Eastern Conference Finals that tested their boss the most, for, in seeing the son imitate the father, even he wondered if history were repeating.

In that interview, before that daunting defeat, Ainge continued: “There just had to be more, so I sat there watching a wall of ice overcome by a waterfall and I realized how it’s better to always be adapting and changing than to ever be fixed in one spot, man. You know, Larry was like that. He was ice cold, but never still. I saw his face in that ice, and I saw that ice melting and I thought that’s what the Celtics used to be. Well, it was either that or when we had to move our team facilities due to the flooding. Either way, though, you can’t tear something down if you never finish building it. Here in Boston we always saw ourselves as architects drafting and redrafting the future’s blue prints.”

The 2047 draft is in four days. The Boston Celtics own the first pick. They also own the second pick, the third pick, and every pick after that. No one knows if the organization will draft all those picks. After all, an active roster only has so much room. Maybe they’ll trade all the picks. Maybe they’ll trade some of them. Rest assured, though, the plan is taking shape. The foundation is solid. The frame is sound.

“You can only have so many resources to sustain a lifetime,” Ainge once said. “But if you stop stockpiling assets, you’re pretty much just burning fuel for the hell of it, and we’ve all seen what happens then. We’ve got wars over water and wars over toilet paper. When we were young, could you imagine such a thing?”

And that’s something no one has ever accused Ainge of having: a lack of imagination. And yet, is it possible he failed to foresee his biggest rival, climate change?

This year the NBA will play its final season, due to a federal law demanding more conservation of the nation’s energy resources. League officials have bemoaned the decision, but also are on record as having expected such a decision for some time now.

Whether Ainge was caught off guard or not, he now has one year to make good on his promise of a second championship in his long tenure as the team’s general manager. His timing is either impeccable or the worst case imaginable, which keeps his legacy of controversial decision-making in tact.

Next: LeBron James, analytics and revisualizing greatness

The Boston roster possesses plenty of talent, as it always does. Ainge has never left the cupboard entirely bare for his long term head coach Brad Stevens, at least not yet. But Stevens and everyone else aren’t quite so young anymore. Next spring, it will have been forty years since Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce and Ray Allen won a championship. Hope springs eternal, but maybe it’s time to cash in those chips.

After all, Brooklyn’s been submerged almost as long as Atlantis, and in 2047, that’s no metaphor, but the way of things.

(***Note: Some readers may not be familiar with the 2013 trade between the Boston Celtics and Brooklyn Nets, but it sent the aging championship core from Boston’s 2008 championship team to Brooklyn and set in motion the mechanisms that would eventually net Ainge and the Celtics every single pick in this year’s draft. Also, the Brooklyn Nets, along with so many of the other franchises once located along the eastern seaboard, are no longer in existence. The Philadelphia 76ers are now the Anchorage Glaciers.)

Home/NBA