The Celtics Are In A Bad Way

I gave Danny Ainge a chance to turn around the Celtics after the Kyrie-Hayward-Horford experiment blew up in his face but after watching this team through 30 games this season, it’s now fair to say that it’s not going to happen and I’m done waiting.

Ainge built a team full of “stars” a couple years ago that absolutely did not work. Kyrie Irving was a complete nut job that Ainge thought could be the franchise, he couldn’t have been more wrong. He thought Gordon Hayward was going to be able to handle the expectations of Boston when for his whole life he played in Indiana and Utah, Ainge badly miscalculated there. He thought average Al Horford would be more than average in Boston, but guess what? He was what we thought he was, average. So that experiment 100% blew up in his face but luckily due to maybe the last great thing he’s done here in Boston, the trade with the Nets in 2013, he had two top 3 draft picks to potentially save the day. He drafted, or maybe a better way to put it, he got handed Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.

Those two players look legit and they have since day one. Both are already top 25 players in this league and will be perennial All Stars. I expect one day they will both be contributors on championship teams but if that’s going to be with the Boston Celtics, changes are going to have to be made.

Ainge took his lumps for how the Kyrie-Hayward-Horford era went but I still stood by him and supported him because he had a chance at a re-do with Tatum and Brown. But we are now roughly 2 years into that and the team is getting worse. The roster is drained of real talent around Tatum and Brown, the coach feels incompetent and overwhelmed, the entire operation feels lackadaisical. I’ve just about had it with this regime in Boston. It feels like Danny caught lightening in a bottle in 2007-08 (or as Uncle Stevie would say, got help from his buddy) and he just can’t figure it out again.

At this point it feels like we are on the verge of wasting Tatum and Brown because as I said, Ainge can’t build a competitive roster around them, the coach isn’t getting the most out of them and the entire organization is just content with being who they’ve been and that’s not good enough.

Maybe we are at the point where this is on Wyc Grousbeck. He needs to bring some urgency to the situation and lay down the hammer. He needs to make changes in his organization or they are going absolutely nowhere and potentially wasting two elite players entering the primes of their careers.

Any other general manager/president wouldn’t have survived the last 14 years but somehow Danny Ainge has, even if you think he’s done a decent job, there is a shelf life for everyone and it feels like the time has come for the Celtics to move on. The operation has become stale and it’s hard to watch at this point. The Celtics are headed in the wrong direction and I’m fearful that until changes are made it’s not going to get any better.