The counter here would be that trades are never easy. Ainge shouldnt be satisfied with losing deals just because his "cards" are valuable enough to bring in big fish without cashing in full value.
As long as the Cs continue to improve their on court product while their biggest assets remain uncashed (cap space and now Brooklyn '17) the "homer argument" will still hold water.
I mean we won 48 games. there is some talent there for sure. that pick will be high. high picks cant be discounted and cap space is the ultimate wildcard. The biggest FA since Lebron James has us in his top 6.
Starting with the obvious note that signing Durant would cure many ills, and then going from there:
You point to the notion that trades aren't easy to defend the inactivity, yet people rave about Ainge and trades. Again, and this is my point, there is a disconnect. Danny, and the team more generally, is given almost 100% credit for everything that goes right, and almost 0% blame for anything that goes wrong (and I get that there are people who reverse that). That doesn't further discussion. We can't combine "Ainge is an awesome trader!" with "Ainge couldn't find any trade that he could live with, even though a bunch of other teams did, so we can't blame Danny, because it was pure coincidence that it worked out that way, for x number of years in a row" and remain intellectually honest.
Should they have made a trade because there actually was one worth making? I don't know. You don't know. Nobody on this board knows, because we don't actually know, for certain, what was, and could have been, on the table. All we do know is that this is the team where the owner insists the team doesn't want to wait for a long rebuild, and has promised "fireworks" in the past, yet hasn't been able to find the big deal, either via trade or FA, in recent offseasons. This discontent is a self-inflicted wound for the Celtics. Most fans would probably have been content to wait on a rebuild through the draft had Wyc & Co. just said that such was the plan.