Every morning, we compile the links of the day and dump them here… highlighting the big story line. Because there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good morning dump.

Beginning Thursday, the Cavaliers and Warriors will play in the NBA Finals for the third consecutive time. The teams are far ahead of their competition, and the gap is widening.

The Celtics have the best chance to gain on those two this summer because of the assets Ainge has secured. The Celtics have the No. 1 overall draft pick, the byproduct of a trade with the Nets that keeps on giving, as well as salary-cap space to sign a maximum free agent.

There is ample opportunity to improve, and the first step is taking skilled guard Markelle Fultz with the first overall pick. The Celtics need to upgrade their frontcourt, but they may be able to do that without sacrificing the first overall pick.

Globe: Celtics must take the next step this offseason

Let’s, for a moment, imagine Danny Ainge as the chief of a village many, many years ago. He has, through a series of shrewd barters and acquisitions from other villages, amassed a tremendous stable of livestock. Chickens, goats, sheep, cows… Chief Ainge has done a masterful job of providing for the village not just for this season, but for the many harsh winters to come. We villagers are mostly thrilled (though some think he’s got a few too many goats, and really, does he need THAT many eggs?) and now we prepare ourselves for a MIGHTY FEAST!

Chief Ainge surveys his grounds… it’s now time to turn some of these fine beasts into a meal.

This is where General Manager Ainge finds himself right now. This is where all the assets start to pay off. It’s also where things can get a bit ugly. The championship feast we’re hoping for requires a lot of dirty work… some of which we might not really like… to properly prepare.

This year’s Celtics team, to me, was particularly enjoyable. Every single benchmark for success was met and most guys met or surpassed expectations. The sting of the Conference Finals aside, I truly derived great pleasure from the 2016-17 Boston Celtics. And some of these guys who made this such a great season will play their next game at the Garden in a visitor’s uniform. Some may be traded. Some the Celtics may just release. This roster will undergo big changes.

It’s hard to say what those changes will be, mostly because we only know what Ainge or a rival GM wants us to know. It’s like looking into dark, hazy night and only seeing a few stars. You know there’s a lot more there, but it’s being obscured. There’s a world of information out there about Ainge’s plans that we just don’t know because that’s how these guys do their work. Past trade talks could be rekindled or new ones can begin as desperate franchises rearrange front offices (or desperate front offices try to save their own jobs). No player on this roster is safe if Ainge is presented with an offer he deems too good to decline.

But in all of this there are still parameters under which Ainge must work. There are salary cap machinations that limit some of what Ainge may want to do. The Celtics will eventually have to pay a luxury tax, which is something they have to carefully avoid until it becomes absolutely necessary (note: once upon a time it was a dollar-for-dollar tax. That has changed to an escalating scale that rises every $5 million a team goes over the tax, and is even more punitive for repeat tax players. A full explanation and chart can be found here). There are certain rules that govern trades that could nix a move two teams might want to make. None of this is very easy.

And this is why I’ve decided that drafting Markelle Fultz, rather than trading the pick, is the best way to move forward on draft night.

While a Godfather deal remains the exception (read: Davis, Anthony), drafting Fultz gives Boston a potential multiple-time All Star under team control, essentially, for up to 9 years (the four-year rookie contract and the ability to match offers in restricted free agency after that or offer a five-year extension). Fultz could become the type of franchise-changing player Ainge has been looking for all along.

Meanwhile, he provides a bit of “Isaiah Thomas” insurance. As much as I love what Isaiah did this season, he’s heading into July looking at possible hip surgery. He’ll turn 29 in the middle of next season and he’ll want a LOT of money. And while I think he’s earned a huge payday, it’s possible he could become trade bait if Ainge believes Fultz-Horford- and (as yet unsigned free agent who may or may not be Gordon Hayward) provide a better combination of talent and financial flexibility moving forward. It’s not out of the question to think Ainge could turn to a Thomas trade at some point as a way to add multiple pieces to his bench and/or acquire future assets like he did in the Pierce/Garnett trade.

For more on these scenarios, our friend Ryan Bernadoni put together a very comprehensive look at the Celtics roster and cap situation over at Celtics Hub. One passage in particular when it comes to all of this is…

Our baseline salary structure, if you assume the addition of Hayward, extension for Smart, 3-year max extension for Thomas, and addition of draft picks, has the team in the tax by 2018-19. That may be fine, but the scary number is that if you add a reasonable Kelly Olynyk re-signing the tax bill starts to get out of control. If you keep Bradley instead of Olynyk, the bill skyrockets to $70M more in salaries and tax than any team has ever paid in a single season. That increases in 2019-20, then in 2020-21 Hayward will be able to opt-out and the team would enter the repeater tax. At that point you start calculating $350M salary and tax bills, which are obviously ridiculous and not going to happen.

In short, it is not viable for the Celtics to add Gordon Hayward, extend Isaiah Thomas, and keep even just all of the players that could mathematically fit under the cap this year. If Hayward signs, it seems far more likely that only one, or maximum two, of Thomas, Bradley, Olynyk, and Smart are still on the team at the end of 2019.

There are a lot of decisions looming for Ainge, and a lot of unexpected variables that will pop up between now and then. With so many guys needing extensions already, I find it hard to believe Ainge will handcuff himself into a short championship window by trading away Fultz to get Paul George or Jimmy Butler back.

No, I think drafting Fultz and having a (relatively) cheap young future star grow around the current veterans makes the most sense. When you consider the possibility of also adding Ante Zizic and maybe Abdel Nader (I’m sorry, D-League Rookie of the Year, Abdel Nader), the Celtics could get a good chunk of the help it needs from rookies next season.

I have to believe that’s what Danny Ainge wants. As Kevin O’Connor put it recently on The Ringer…

The question is, are they building for 2018 or 2025 — or both? There are no guarantees a deal would require sending Fultz or even Jaylen Brown, but keeping them would assure the ability to build for the present and future. The Celtics will have the rights to Fultz for at least eight years until he’s an unrestricted free agent in 2025. Fultz will be 27 that year. Brown will be 29. George would be 35, and Butler would be 36. “In this day’s NBA, picks are very, very valuable. You have a young person that you can help mold and grow with,” Grousbeck said the morning after the draft lottery. “Bring him in before the max salaries kick in. [It] makes a lot of sense to keep these picks.”

Keeping the 2017 and 2018 picks would enable Boston to keep competing now while also having a young roster built for sustainable success into the next decade. The Celtics would also retain those assets for a bigger fish from the next wave of trade targets, rather than dumping them now for a short-term gain that still might not be enough to beat Cleveland.

I had an initial kick in my gut that said “trade the pick.” It’s perfectly reasonable to say “The Celtics just made the Conference Finals but it’s obvious they’re a star player away. Trade the future for THAT guy RIGHT NOW so we can beat the Cavs next year and get to the Finals.”

That’s not necessarily wrong to think, but it would create a very short window for the Celtics, which goes against everything Danny Ainge has done and said. Ainge wants a Spurs-like long-term run, and the Spurs had three key elements that made the run possible:

1. Tim Duncan
2. Gregg Popovich
3. A draft strategy big on long-view selections such as draft-and-stash’s and “diamond in the rough” projects while adding solid veterans to an established core

The Celtics have Brad Stevens, who is as close to a Pop protegé as anyone can be without having actually served as a Spurs assistant. The mutual respect between those guys is well documented.

While some of you might question Ainge’s drafting, he has attempted to move to this long-view strategy. Zizic seems quite promising. Nader’s wild Summer League carried over into D-League success which is by no means a guarantee but it’s a lot better than D-League failure. And of course there’s Guerschon Yabusele who, if he’s willing to stay overseas one more year, could fill a key role down the line (and it will give Ainge one more year of The Dancing Bear under a rookie deal while he makes decisions on Futz/Zizic/Nader).

Can Fultz be the Duncan of this group? There’s no telling how he’ll ultimately pan out, but the kid has the potential to fill the “face of the franchise” role.

So yes, Ainge can trade the pick if he wants and give the Celtics a challenger to the Cavs and, maybe, the Warriors. I will admit I have said in the past that you should almost always trade an unknown away for the established entity. But this, to me, is the exception. The Celtics have a rare opportunity to have the franchise-carrying star they’ve longed for walk through that door as a 19-year-old rookie.

So don’t ruin your appetites with a quick fix… because we’re preparing for a feast!

Related links: Herald: With top pick coming, roster will be changing  |  ProJo: Ainge has his work cut out for him this summer

Page 2: Thank you Mitch Kupchack for screwing up the Chris Paul trade

In fact, in the course of the weekend, we thought we could re-do the deal. We really thought that Houston would be ready to part with [Kyle] Lowry, and we had a trade lined up for Odom that would have gotten us a good first-round draft pick – not we, but my basketball folks. But Mitch Kupchak at the time panicked and moved Odom to Dallas. So the piece wasn’t even there for us to play with at the time. So that was it — just about what was good for the then-New Orleans Hornets.

Silver Screen and Roll (via ProBasketballTalk)

For those who don’t remember, Chris Paul was nearly traded from New Orleans to the Lakers in December of 2011. In fact the deal had been done, but the NBA vetoed the trade.

There is a misconception since then that the NBA nixed the deal because it was too lopsided. What people forget is the NBA was running the team as its de-facto owner in a weird situation where they’d bought the team to let an owner out of his obligation. So when David Stern, acting as an owner rather than as commissioner, saw the original deal wasn’t a good one for New Orleans, he killed it. 

The New Orleans Hornets had agreed to send Paul, a four-time All-Star, to the Lakers in a three-team deal that involved the Houston Rockets. Only 45 minutes after the teams reached an agreement, Stern called the Hornets and vetoed the deal, according to a person involved in the deal.

“The league has killed it,” said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing his role in the talks. “I know that’s 100 percent true.”

Asked who had made the decision, the person said, “It definitely was David.”

The league did not immediately explain the decision, other than to issue a terse statement through a spokesman, saying, “League office declined to make the trade for basketball reasons.”

Now it turns out Mitch Kupchack had a chance to re-work his deal and still pair Chris Paul with Kobe Bryant… but he panicked and moved a key piece, Lamar Odom, to Dallas. This effectively killed the deal and Paul went to the Clippers.

Could the Lakers have won another title or two with Paul and Kobe together? I don’t know and I’m glad we didn’t find out.

Thank, Mitch.

The rest of the links:

CSNNE: Mock Draft 3.0

Globe: Sunday notes: The maturation of JR Smith

Herald: Bulpett: Danny Ainge quite happy with Isaiah Thomas and Al Horford