Doc Rivers finally said what many have been thinking on Monday morning.
Danny Ainge shouldn’t have traded Kendrick Perkins in the middle of the season, and doing so removed many critical advantages that the Celtics had prior to the move.
According to Boston.com, Rivers said on WEEI that the move dramatically harmed the continuity and know-how on his roster.
“Well, it was more not that the trust went away, the know-how went away,” Rivers said. “The continuity went away. That’s what the trade affected more than anything. Obviously, Perk was great to our team and all that. But it was more that you have new guys playing different positions and you had a guy who could literally reach back into a playbook and throw out something that was three or four years old and they all knew it, when Perk was there.
“When you lose Perk, you take that one guy out of that starting lineup. Now there’s the fifth guy who doesn’t know your offense three years ago; he only knows what he knows since he’s been there. And that limited our group. With [Rajon] Rondo, because the way teams guard him, you need a massive playbook. That took more away from it than we thought.”
Rivers would’ve done things differently.
“Well, I would wait until after the year is over. I’ll put it that way.,” Rivers said. “I do think Jeff Green has a chance to be a starter for us in the future and a hell of a basketball player. And [Nenad] Krstic can help. But making that trade at the time we made that trade, that made it very tough for us. And not only that, we added other pieces as well that we tried to fit in.
“It was just a lot of moving parts to a team that the advantage that we had was that we had continuity. Everybody else was new. Chicago was new, and the Heat were new. They couldn’t fall back on what we could fall back on with our starting five. Once we made that trade, we took that advantage away.”
