Snidely FC wrote:SMTBSI wrote:Why is there now this assumption that Ainge is some slavering monster trying to wreak havoc on the league and willing to torpedo his own team just to do it? This narrative has taken on a life of its own that's bordering on the surreal.
because any reasonable GM would have jumped at Indiana's Turner+McDermott S&T for Hayward instead he tried to extort Turner + Warren or Olidipo neither of which was ever going to happen and if he'd just been reasonable CHA & BOS wouldn't be in this mess
JMAC3 wrote:I think we approached Hayward assuming it would be easy to work out a sign a trade with Boston, but Danny still had Myles Turner and Oladipo on his brain so he asked the Hornets to include some combo of Rozier and a first/Bridges. We quickly became bored with that conversation and just announced the signing and said we would waive Batum to make it work while we tried to figure out a deal.
I have a very different take on what went down, even than most of my own fanbase. Over there, they're either teeing off on Ainge for being "greedy", or trying to convince themselves that we preferred Tristan Thompson over Myles Turner in the first place (lol).
In particular, I seriously doubt the timeline being suggested here, that Charlotte engaged us on a sign-and-trade, and only threatened to stretch Batum after we refused to be reasonable. Maybe you guys heard something we didn't, but we never heard a single peep that Charlotte was in the picture until the official 4/120 deal came down. Caught us completely by surprise.
Here's what I think happened, and yes, it's pure speculation, but I honestly think it fits the fact pattern.
1.)
Our first preference was actually just to re-sign Hayward. We thought we'd offered him enough $ that the likelihood of a third team swooping in and making a godfather offer was pretty low. Atlanta moved on, New York's offer was never competitive. We didn't think you guys would actually go to the nuclear option and stretch Batum. So, we assigned a pretty low value to the probability of losing him for nothing - we figured, one way or the other, he was going to wind up either with us or Indy.
2.) We knew he had his heart set on Indy, and were willing to work with him to make that happen
to an extent. But not to the extent of eating a clear loss. We viewed Hayward as clearly the best player in a Hayward for Turner+McDermott trade, and by enough of a margin that making that trade was a clear loss (I do personally think it makes us worse on-court, but I seem to value Hayward more than most - I think he's going to step it up this season with you). Since we were perfectly fine simply resigning Hayward, and viewed losing him for nothing as pretty unlikely, we asked for enough from Indy to make it a win, content with the fact that if they said no, we'd just keep him.
Where it all fell apart is obviously that you
did make the godfather offer, essentially willing to commit $40 a year to Hayward's roster slot, after stretching Batum. But, I don't blame them for assigning a low probability to that outcome. I mean, we all acknowledge it is kind of crazy, right?
Anyway, the key points here are that:
1.) it was very much in our interest for no other teams to be involved. If we were trying to leverage Indy, having anyone else in the picture obliterates our leverage. We needed them to believe we were perfectly content keeping Hayward, and had the ability to do so.
2.)
We were not motivated to facilitate a Hayward trade to any other destination. We really wanted to just keep him. We were only ever even engaging with Indy because that's where he wanted to go, and we thought that mutual interest gave us some leverage - was essentially our only opportunity to find an outcome superior to simply keeping him. There was no reason at all for us to be trying to find a third home for him, where that opportunity didn't exist.In that light, Charlotte's only mechanism for acquiring Hayward was to go to the nuclear option and threaten the Batum stretch-waive. Once you declared your willingness to do that, okay, now we're in a new reality and have to try to figure out how to make the best of it for everyone, which is what's going on now.
