The Celtics are rumored to be cooking something up on the trade market. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a deal is imminent. Danny Ainge seems to prefer to take his time.
Ainge explained during his weekly call on Toucher and Rich Thursday morning that trades don’t happen overnight, not even ones that happen well before the NBA trade deadline. Even Brooklyn’s deal for James Harden originated during the offseason and took months to actually come together.
So if Ainge is making a trade for the Celtics, especially a major one, he’s going to make sure he doesn’t rush into anything. He’s not concerned about the heightened urgency surrounding the struggling Celtics, whom Ainge himself admitted is not good enough to win a championship.
“Yeah, of course people would love to make trades earlier, but you don’t get the deals you want,” Ainge said. “Teams that don’t care as much or they have a player that they’re auctioning off to the entire [league] or waiting for the best deal. Like, for example, you know, Isaiah Thomas, we got Isaiah Thomas a deal during the season. And it was a good trade. It was a fair trade under the circumstances. And, you know, turned out to be a really good deal for us. But at the beginning the price was way too high. Like two months before we weren’t going to do that deal. And so the deal came came to us in a way.
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“You can’t force deals to happen and you can’t give up too much right out of the gate. And that’s typically what teams are trying to do that that are sellers.”
Either way, it sounds like Ainge is going to maintain patience when talking to other teams about potential trades. The 2021 NBA trade deadline isn’t until March 25, so he has plenty of time.
Listen below for the full interview with Danny Ainge on Toucher and Rich.