Danny Ainge touched on a bunch of different topics during his weekly interview with Toucher and Rich. First up, analytics, specifically Charles Barkely’s rant last night on TNT:
“The Rockets sucked for a long time, so they went out and paid James Harden a lot of money; they got better,” Barkley said on the TNT postgame broadcast. “Then they went out and got Dwight Howard; they got better. …
“The NBA is about talent,” Barkley continued. “All these guys who run these organizations who talk about analytics, they have one thing in common — they’re a bunch of guys who have never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school, and they just want to get in the game.”
Whether you agree with Charles or not, you must admit that’s funny. Ainge said the Celtics put a lot into analytics but there are “no magic formulas.”
Because of the imbalance between the quality of teams in the Eastern and Western Conferences, there’s a push to revise playoff seedings (take top 16 teams regardless of conference affiliation) and to even do away with conferences all-together:
“I would have to think more about it. I understand it logically. I do like the rivalries in the conferences. I think there’s different schedules being played: Eastern Conference teams play Eastern Conference teams more than they play Western Conference teams. I would have to evaluate that. Right now there is an imbalance [between conferences]. I think everybody can see that. I also think that those things are cyclical.
“I mean, if you’re not one of the top eight teams in your conference, regardless of what’s going on in another conference, do you really deserve to be a playoff team? You may deserve it more than a team that’s making it in the East, and I guess that’s the point, but you’re still ninth or tenth in your conference. So I don’t know, I like it the way it is. But I would be open to discussing those kinds of changes also.”
No thanks. I’ll keep the conferences and divisions.
As for the upcoming trade deadline, Ainge wouldn’t tip his hand:
“I don’t know. We’re opportunistic. There’s a lot of different things that can happen. I don’t anticipate, because right now we don’t have anything imminent. But you never know what happens at the trade deadline. But we’re ready, we have a lot of bullets in our arsenal right now. We have a lot of assets that we can move for lots of different things and go in a lot of different directions at this point,” Ainge told T&R.
“But there’s not teams looking to make those kinds of major changes, is my perspective right now heading into this trade deadline. So I’m not sure what may happen.”
Ainge is armed and ready, but I’m afraid there won’t be much action at the trade deadline.
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