Entire YEARS of the rebuild are wasted by competing this year for a playoff spot.
Keeping Stevens happy doesn't matter if the team inevitably has to go through pain for the picks, which will then lead Stevens to leaving anyways.
Stevens and role players won't attract top flight FAs.
And it's not just about drafting a potential superstar, it's the "optionality" of using those assets to trade for superstars. No one on this team is an asset except for Marcus Smart. Thinking anything else is feeding into the homerism hype of trade value (aka Brandon Bass syndome).
Year? As in, plural? So far, making the playoffs his year had taken off exactly one year for the tanking crew.
YEARS. PLURAL.
By the time the Celtics realize they need a complete teardown, Marcus Smart will be too good to prevent that. THen what, you trade Marcus Smart to tank harder? Or you ride that treadmill.
The OKC model is one possibility. And they would've gone all the way if they kept Harden and amnestied Perk, but that's on their owner. Half assed the easy part after the finished the hard part.
But all you need is 1 superstar. Houston traded for it because they had strong assets (the guaranteed Toronto lotto pick + Lamb, a mid lotto pick). Then they used the 1 cornerstone to attract the other in FA.
The difference between Philly and the Celtics is that this year, Philly fans are leaving this year with hope that their assets have strong potential to become franchise players. Noel has more star potential than anyone on this roster. With the Celtics, the strongest form of hope is the Brooklyn picks, which are overrated because Brooklyn has 0 incentive to full-tank (like how they treadmilled this year into the 8th seed) and have plenty of 2016 FA cap space. This roster has no potential. For some fans, you can put on rose colored glasses and pretend like Crowder actually means something longterm. But realistic fans see the despair in a situation of championship irrelevancy for the next 7+ years. The Sixers have legitimate hope. These years have meaning for them, despite their record. This Celtics roster, realistically looking, even Simmons joking about this multiple times, is a team of role players.
The Sixers plan can completely blow up. But so can any plan. Their picks = some possibility. This current roster = 0% chance at anything relevant. So you're just banking on a dumb GM to trade a disgrunted superstar and having a superior offer with a team of role players and overrated Brooklyn picks (when it comes to superstar trades, can we outbid the Knicks if they offer their #1 pick for Cousins? No). Or you're hoping for a FA swoon, which, in 2016, every NBA team will have cap space.
Your argument is predicated on a couple things.
1. The picks Ainge has control over are overrated.
2. There aren't many dumb GM's in the league.
But...
1. All three Brooklyn picks
could be lottery picks. So
could the Dallas pick next year. Hell, even the Celtics' own picks going forward
could be lottery picks. We're not talking about championship-caliber rosters in the foreseeable future. Picks are valued for what they
could be. The picks we own are very, very valuable. One can imagine a scenario where they wind up being non-lottery picks, sure. That's the case with almost every future 1st round pick, ever. Crapshoot upon crapshoot. Any rival GM would love
any of those picks. So, you are wrong. Not overrated.
2. The league is
full of dumb and less-smart-than-Ainge GM's. You cite the Thunder, who have one of the smartest GM's in the NBA, but...who made one of the dumbest decisions in NBA history, which you reference in the very next line. Even smart team execs make dumb-as-rocks decisions. And the truly dumb execs, of which there is no shortage, make decisions like that
all the time.
So, yeah, loading up on non-overrated picks and banking on other execs to make stupid calls? That's a good strategy. Especially if you're a clever enough trader to extract surplus value from even the non-dumb execs with mediocre assets like trade exceptions and second rounders.
p.s. How can both A. Complain that Marcus will be singlehandedly so good it'll prevent the Celtics from tanking, and yet B. Assert that the roster has no potential?
Does not compute.