Anthony Davis. You love him, I love him and we all talk about his eyebrows.
We also talk about him becoming a Celtic. Is it unrealistic? Perhaps, given that Davis is a 24-year-old star whose team doesn’t need to trade him, but then again we’re talking about Danny Ainge. That dude gets what he wants and he perpetually has the assets to make things happen.
That’s why it didn’t take until the new year for us to be talking about the C’s going after the Pelicans center yet again. Adrian Wojnarowski reported Monday that Davis is well aware of the Celtics’ “vigilant” pursuit of a trade for him.
Acquiring Davis would give Boston perhaps the best trio in the league outside of Golden State next season. It would guarantee the C’s would win the Eastern Conference next season and the year after.
Pass.
Davis is obviously a great, great player and one at a position where the Celtics have not had stars in years. But talking the Pelicans into trading him would mean giving up too much: Chris Forsberg of ESPN warned recently on Boston Sports Tonight that you might be talking about Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, the Lakers/Kings pick and more. Al Horford would be a good bet to be involved to make the money work. And that makes sense, really, given that trading Anthony Davis to a team with Jayson Tatum and not getting Jayson Tatum back would be a fireable offense.
Pass.
Boston Celtics
What Ainge has done with the Nets picks -- both in terms of acquiring them and using them — has been nothing short of magnificent. With the Lakers/Kings pick acquired in a deal that sent one of those picks away, the C’s could very well come away from the 2018 draft with one of the bigs projected to go early, whether it’s Marvin Bagley, Mo Bamba or Jaren Jackson Jr.
If that were to happen, it would mean Ainge would have turned the return for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett into:
- An elite point guard (Kyrie Irving)
- A damn good shooting guard (Jaylen Brown)
- A potentially elite small forward (Jayson Tatum)
- An at least starter at power forward or center.
That’s amazing. That’s four-fifths of a potential starting lineup on a championship-caliber team that also happens to have Gordon Hayward and Al Horford kicking around for good measure.
It’s also the smart play given that this team’s championship window truly starts when things start to change out west with the Warriors. If you were to have a team that was Kyrie, Hayward, Davis and not much star power after it, you’d for sure dominate the East for a few years. But aren’t the Celtics going to do that anyway?
Trading for Davis would make the C’s competitive against the Warriors next season, but Golden State would probably still be favored in the Finals. So wouldn’t it be smarter to let Tatum and Brown continue to blossom, see what Golden State looks like after Klay Thompson and Draymond Green get new contracts and go from there?
Loading up with Kyrie, Hayward and Davis would be crazy exciting next season, but that might be because anyone envisioning these scenarios is comparing this roster, which doesn’t have Hayward, to that Kyrie-Hayward-Davis trio of the future, which would. Consider instead this current group once Hayward comes back. It’s damn good and it would be for a long time.
It’s not that Davis isn’t tempting. There’s a real discussion to be had for whether you’d trade Tatum, Brown and more for a player like him. But the discussion should end with the Celtics keeping what they have.
P.S. I also didn’t want the Celtics to trade Al Jefferson for Kevin Garnett lmao