Earlier this week, The Athletic’s Jason Lloyd revealed that earlier in the season one anonymous Cavs player told him that Danny Ainge was “a fucking thief’ for fleecing the Cavs in the Kyrie Irving trade.
After one brutal loss during the regular season, a Cavs player told me, "Danny Ainge is a fucking thief." How this Game 2 loss on another tough night illustrates the Cavs' season of mistakes. Final Thoughts…https://t.co/Xp0O5KSkbT
— Jason Lloyd (@ByJasonLloyd) May 16, 2018
Yesterday, Ainge was asked about the Cavs player’s remark about him and he fired off this fairly thoughtful response.
Via Boston.com
“First of all, time will tell,” “But that pick that we gave them had the chance to be the No. 1 pick in the draft. It turned out to be No. 8, but who knows? They may get a really good player with the No. 8 pick in this year’s draft. There are some very good players at the top.
“They turned Isaiah and Jae Crowder into other pieces, Clarkson and Hood and so forth,” “Time will tell on all these trades, but at the time, we were criticized for giving up too much. And we gave up a lot. We liked Jae Crowder and we liked Isaiah Thomas. And we liked that Brooklyn pick.”
“I thought it was a fair trade at the time,”\“Both key players in Isaiah and Kyrie aren’t playing in this [Eastern Conference Finals] series, which is interesting, but we liked the trade for us then and we like it now. Hopefully it works out for both teams.”
While the Celtics certainly won the trade the Cavs were put in a tough spot when Irving forced a trade last offseason, It doesn’t seem like the Cavs could have done much better considering the circumstances.