There is no way in hell they can trade the Brooklyn picks now
****, I dunno if an all star team could beat either GSW or Cleveland at this point
Gotta build for the post LeBron era... no way to beat him for the next 3-4 years IMO
I think that's unreasonable.
Lebron and the Cavs aren't as great as people make them out to be. They are great, yes. But they aren't unbeatable.
Hell we won a game against them, on their home court, without our best player. Then we ALMOST did it again the next day - except we blew it mentally in the 3rd and blew a double digit lead that we had held the entire game.
Boston has three major limitations that holds us back right now.
1: Horford is our only starting calibre big - we need a PF or C (that opposing teams won't laugh at) who can start effectively alongside him.
2: We are one of the worst rebounding teams in the league, and had major struggles in the playoffs because opposing teams were consistently killing us on the boards. Chicago, Washington, Cleveland - they all dominated us on the rebounds.
3: Our offence is way too predictable because Isaiah Thomas is the only shot creator on our roster. Cleveland's players/staff said it straight out - when we have Thomas on the court we are easy to gameplan against, because you always know exactly how we are going to play. Everything goes through Thomas. We need a second shot creator that we can run the offence through so that we can throw different looks at teams, so that our offence isn't so easy to predict and defend.
If we fix those three problems, then there's no reason to believe that we cannot compete with (and potentially beat) Cleveland in a 7 game series - and fixing those three issues isn't as hard as it may seem.
Lets say we pull off a trade of Crowder/Brown/Brooklyn 2018 1st to the Pacers for Paul George. That gives us a second shot creator and solves problem #3 while also giving us a guy who can defend Lebron James one-on-one about as well as anybody in the league can.
Now we can use the $30M or so in cap space that we have available to sign a starting caliber big like Nerlens Noel. Doesn't have to be a star like Griffin, just needs to be a starting calibre big who can defend the paint and rebound the ball, so Noel probably would do fine playing a similar role to what Tyson Chandler played in Dallas (when they beat Lebron's Heat). Now you have solved problem #1 and problem #2, because with Horford/Noel up front it's unlikely that Kevin Love and Tristan Thompson could kill us inside the way he did this year...and it likely still leaves us with plenty of cap space to re-sign our existing players (like Olynyk, etc).
Suddenly with just two moves you have plugged in all of your weaknesses, while still managing to keep four promising young prospects (in Fultz, Rozier, Smart and Noel) who can potentially carry the torch for this team once our vets fade out.
That scenario may not be to everybody's taste, I'm just throwing it out there to demonstrate the fact that it wouldn't really take THAT much for us to be a legitimate threat to Cleveland, while still maintaining a lot of future talent too.