Steven Stamkos is considering the Bruins! Kevin Durant wants to meet with the Celtics! Dave Dombrowski has a plan! Silly season is upon us.
Sources say the Bruins are one of three teams Stamkos is ready to consider!
Sources say the Celtics are one of six teams Durant is ready to consider!
Sources say Dombrowski is talking with the five teams ready to consider auctioning off the kind of pitching help the Red Sox desperately need!
Some sources should be wearing straightjackets!
So should the people listening to them.
These “reports’’ lead me to believe this: All three teams have washing machines that are stuck on the spin cycle.
Folks, Stamkos is not going to be wearing the “spoked B.” Durant is not going to be wearing Celtics green. And Dombrowski might want to make a trade, but at the moment, he sounds like Danny Ainge the day after all those assets he kept telling Celtics fans he’d been stockpiling to make The Big Move turned out to be the basketball version of Small Ball.
In a two-man draft, the Celtics held pick No. 3 and seven other equally worthless selections. Yet Wyc Grousbeck wants you to believe they couldn’t make a deal because of some NBA conspiracy and so were forced to draft a kid who can’t shoot instead. Don’t they already have a bench full of guys who can’t shoot?
When Wyc tried to come out and reassure Green-teamers assembled at a draft “party” that his team didn’t have a no-trade clause but their opponents did, he was booed as if he was Bill Polian. Later, Grousbeck would call the peeved reaction the worst he’d heard from his team’s fans in 14 years when he tried to explain away Ainge failing to swing deals that were never going to happen for Jimmy Butler or Jahlil Okafor. Keep claiming you have “assets” when they are really detriments that turn into 19-year-olds who can’t shoot, and you better get used to it.
When you lead fans to believe you can do things you can’t, or have assets that you don’t, or that Durant or Stamkos might come to Boston for anything other than a cup of chowdah, you’re asking for trouble.
Sure Ainge wanted to make a trade, the same as Dombrowski wants to make a trade. Yet so far they sound like they’re blood brothers, when they’re really victims of their opponents’ scouting eye.
“The thing you got to remember is it takes two clubs to make a deal,” Dombrowski said during the weekend.
A week ago, Ainge said the same thing almost word for word. Translation: Don’t blame me. Blame the team behind the tree.
“Most clubs, as I’ve said all along — and it hasn’t changed whatsoever — really are not prepared to move toward 2017 and be in a position of where they’re willing to move,” Dombrowski said.
Tell that to the Padres, who just shipped James Shields to the White Sox for infield prospect Fernando Tatis Jr. and minor league pitcher Erik Johnson while agreeing to swallow a large portion of the roughly $58 million left on Shields’ contract.
This is not to advocate a Shields trade, which seems a desperate measure to acquire a player who could use the spin cycle himself because he’s already washed up. But it does argue against the idea that you can’t make a trade.
The truth is you can make a trade but not if you want to acquire value and give up detritus. Keep taking that position and your position won’t improve, and neither will your fans’ disposition.
“I think everyone wants a deal,’’ Ainge said to my colleague Mark Murphy recently. “I think everyone expects a deal. We’ve been working really hard on trying to get a deal and do something significant, but we just haven’t been able to do it yet, and it’s not because we’re not trying. It’s not because we’re turning down or we overvalue our players or any of that stuff. It’s because you need a partner. I’ve said this many times before: I tried three years to get (Kevin Garnett) before we got him. It just takes the right time and the right place and have a partner that wants to do a deal.”
Actually, Dan, people are happy to make deals. Just not for picks nobody wants to make, including you, or players who can’t score, which you have in abundance.
“We’re not afraid to make deals, but we don’t want to make bad deals,’’ Ainge said last week.
Or was that Dombrowski this week?
Ainge says he’s not interested in instant gratification. Eight years since winning the NBA title and six years since reaching the Finals seems more like delayed gratification. So with the Celtics, Bruins and Red Sox becalmed, suddenly “sources say” Durant wants to talk to Ainge and Stamkos wants to talk with Don Sweeney. Who wants to talk to Dombrowski? Jake Arrieta?
Who knows, but “team sources” want you to know this: Everything’s great in Boston, folks, so keep buying those tickets.