Danny Ainge may be the leader of one of the NBA’s most prestigious franchises but he’s in the same boat as everyone else in the world right now when it comes to identifying when sports can safely resume amid the coronavirus: Holding out hope with no sense of what comes next.
"I think Adam (Silver) has some tough decisions but I trust him and what he’s doing,” Ainge said Wednesday in a conference call. “The Board of Governors, I think they’re going to do what’s best, but I’m holding out hope that we’re still going to play some basketball this year. That’s just me being a fan. I don’t really have any inside information on that.”
In the meantime, Ainge is working diligently with his basketball operations staff remotely as they prepare for the NBA offseason whenever that does officially come. Currently, the NBA Draft is still scheduled for June 25th but with no hope of the NBA season being finished by then (unless it's outright canceled), the Celtics are doing their best to proceed with their draft prep like its business as usual.
“It’s not difficult, you still have to study and watch players,” Ainge said of the offseason calendar uncertainty. “You still have to do background checks and gather information on players, and you still have to keep working and preparing as if the draft was going to happen on June 25th until we hear otherwise. I don’t think any of us anticipates that will be the case, but it’s possible.”
The Celtics won’t nearly have the same kind of access with draft workouts for prospects and in-person interviews like a usual year but they will be able to make contact with prospects via video conferencing.
“We’ve been allowed to do some calls with some of the seniors, “ Ainge said. “But they haven’t gotten the underclassmen list out yet, we won’t be able to have any communication with them until after that, but yeah, there’s a lot of preparation. The reason I was a few minutes late is because we were just finishing up a conference call with my staff, and we do that 3 or 4 days a week, and we go through entire conferences and talk about all the players in the whole conference, and that’s what we’ve been doing this morning.”
The absence of in-person workouts and interviews will put the C’s brass in a tough spot since that’s an area the team has leaned on heavily in past years to help settle a tie between prospects or push them to make a move for a player via trade.
“I can just give you a few examples, but let’s just take Rajon Rondo as an example,” Ainge explained. “Had I not been able to see him in the draft workout and sat down and talked with him and looked into his eyes, I don’t think I would have drafted him. So I think there is value in that.
“At the same time, we drafted Avery Bradley without any draft workouts. We drafted Steve Nash back in our Phoenix days without a draft workout. So I think you don’t always get guys in for draft workouts but you have to be prepared to take guys. That’s why we’re doing so much homework at this time and taking advantage of getting ahead of the game in case we don’t get draft workouts. But we’ll be prepared.”
While it’s evident there will be a clear lasting impact on league revenue due to the extended shutdown, Ainge has not received any kind of guidance yet from the league in terms of how the projected $115 million salary cap may be impacted next year.
“All we can do is do is try to project as best we can, and that's what we’ve always done,” he said. “Our guys that are the projectors of the salary cap, Bill Reissfelder, mostly, have done a fantastic job over the many years. So I’ll just listen to what they have to say and we’ll get the updates from the league as they come in, but right now I’m just preparing for free agency, preparing for the draft, watching a lot of film, and controlling the things that I can control.”
For now, Ainge and the coaching staff are doing their best to try to stay in contact with players regularly as the shutdown approaches the six-week mark. There will be a chance to see some separation within players who stayed committed to staying in shape more during this isolation period and Ainge is eager to see who rises from that challenge if this season does resume.
“This is a time for the really self-motivated that are going to be able to take advantage of this opportunity in their career to get stronger, to get in greater condition,” he said. “We’re approaching this like we’re going to return to play and we’re going to be playing playoff basketball. So we are staying in touch, we are having conference calls where we have guest speakers, motivational speakers who address all of our guys on Zoom.
“We are doing workouts with the coaches and with the strength coaches via Zoom and so forth. So we’re trying to do all we can. Some players are better than others at doing things on their own and doing extra work, and some players are more compliant than others, some are harder to reach than others, but for the most part, I’ve been impressed with how our players have bought in and the work that’s going on behind the scenes.”
Other Leftover Takeaways
—Ainge on the celebrity guest speakers for the Celtics so far: “We’ve had Mark Wahlberg, was great. He was a lot of fun, had some really good stories. LL Cool J, his story is pretty fascinating. Jim Cash, who is always magnificent to listen to, had some great wisdom and knowledge for the players. And we had Dr. Myron Rolle, who has a fascinating story here at Mass General. So yeah, we’ve had some very inspirational speakers.”
—Ainge on Kevin Garnett’s induction to the HOF: “We all know Kevin is a lock, automatic, first-ballot Hall-of-Famer. I think we knew that when he arrived here even before what he did in Boston. Winning a championship solidified that for him. Whenever I think of KG, I just smile. The guy just cracks me up. He was so intense. He was fun, he was funny, he was serious, he was driven. As much as anything, he was a unifier. He wanted and he thrived in an environment where it was all about the team. He didn’t like conflict or too much chaos. I think he liked a little bit of chaos periodically but anyway, he was a fantastic teammate. It’s well documented and obviously one of the top players in the history of the game. Him, Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant are automatic.”
—Ainge on the Last Dance documentary: “I watched it with my family, with my two youngest boys and their wives and it was fun because they didn’t have much recollection of it. When I would chime in to add a comment on something that was going on they pretty much gave me the hush, like, ‘We’re listening to this. We don’t care what you have to say. We want to listen to this documentary. So they were really, really into it. And that was kind of fun to see how excited and interested they were and how little they knew of that whole era and whole little they knew about Michael. Not just how good of a player he was. They’d obviously heard that. But just intrigued by who he was.”