I look back on the Antoine days fondly. Yes, he was flawed. When he and Pierce got it going, though, the Celtics were a lot of fun to watch.
I wonder, in an alternative history, what happens if the Celts don't botch the 2001 draft. If we'd just ignored the Kedrick Brown nonsense and focused on the conventional wisdom of who we should have taken, we're looking at:
Vitali Potapenko / Tony Battie
Antoine Walker / Troy Murphy
Paul Pierce / Eric Williams / Waltah!
Joe Johnson
Tony Parker / Kenny Anderson
Even after all of Pitino's missteps, that team could have made the Finals.
Anyway, Antoine was mostly wrong in his assessment of Danny, but he was right that trading him for Raef LaFrentz was a huge miscalculation. When you trade your franchise star -- even a flawed one -- you hope to get a building block, rather than somebody where you have to sacrifice a lottery pick just to get rid of their contract.