Oh, that "big game hunting" thing was totally misquoted. Honestly it was irresponsible by the media folk. It was so clear it was taken out of context it made me not even want to read any quotes from our local media at all because it was blatantly dishonest. I'd rather just listen to the actual press conferences bc I don't think it was possible to misunderstand what Ainge was saying. It was intentionally presented that way to drum up the frenzy it did. I think Ainge is intentionally dishonest all the time, as he should, but that was just poor journalism.
I think people obsess over the "timeline" too much. Like there's no rule saying everyone must peak at the same time. Most teams have players at different stages of their career. I just don't think we have enough to make the playoffs with Lauri even if we make a lot of trades and acquire a lot of talent. We can't just snap our fingers and decide that we're a playoff team. I think the decision to give up Lauri is as much about the difficulty of even getting to playoff level (beyond that obviously even more difficult) as it is the rewards of tanking. We just don't have a lot right now. Maybe Keyonte turns out to be Lisan Al-Ghaib or we hit the next Mitchell/Gobert homerun this draft. It would have sucked to have just traded Lauri, but it's not a bad place to be with the extra assets.
Right now with Lauri, we basically need to hit a home run to get out of this mediocre situation.
