Celtics Owner Wyc Grousbeck Provided Some Insight Into The Hiring Of Brad Stevens

I love shit like this, can’t get enough of it. So when I saw this clip float around Twitter this morning I stopped everything I was doing, gave it a listen and could not have been happier with what my ears heard. I’m a sucker for anything behind the scenes involving this team obviously, and I feel like I’m not alone in that regard. Obviously there were a ton of highlights but a few thing stood out to me

– Wyc did pretty much what I expected him to do in regards to the Kyrie question and his contract situation. Obviously he wasn’t going to give the answer maybe we all wanted, and instead just praised him for how awesome he is. Standard stuff.

– His explanation of how they ended up on Brad

“We had a conversation and he said, ‘Doc is leaving, who do you want to hire?’ I said, ‘I don’t know to hire but I know the job specs. I’ve been thinking about this.’ We had an old-school, fantastic coach, but very old-school with certain rules that the starting five had to be the finishing five,” Grousbeck said. “It’s sort of like playing baseball. There are a lot of old-school (things) that don’t necessarily make a lot of sense. We wouldn’t have won without Doc. We had a great nine years. But he moved on. I said, ‘I want to a young gun. I don’t want an NBA retread. I don’t want anyone who has been fired in the NBA. I’m not going to have a retread. We’re going to start fresh. Danny (Ainge), I want a mind that matches with yours and you guys can do creative things.’ He said, ‘Oh a partner in crime. Let’s have a college coach.’ Exactly. That’s the point. Let’s go for it. Let’s take a risk. He recommended Brad and we got to know Brad over a period of time and went to meet him in person and got him on the plane and brought him back to Boston.”

Now Wyc wasn’t lying when he said they don’t win the 2008 title without Doc. That’s true. At that time it wasn’t so much about the Xs and Os as it was about managing all those egos and Doc was as master at that. Actual coaching responsibilities is a different discussion. While Wyc didn’t go into the actual story of hiring Brad, hopefully you’ve heard it because it’s pretty wild. He never even met Ainge in person until the day he was actually hired, and it all went down while Ainge was in the process of trading the Big 3 at the same time.

Hearing Wyc talk about how he wanted Danny to find a fellow basketball genius so they could do creative things together made all the blood in my body rush to my naughty parts because that’s exactly what’s happened. This team is about as versatile as you’ll find in the NBA, and Brad certainly isn’t afraid to try something wacky like playing Smart at the five if he feels like it. I feel like because Brad is widely considered one of the best coaches in the league people forget about what it was like that summer when this announcement was made. Not one person was even remotely thinking about Brad Stevens as a possibility, and when I saw that flash across my TV screen I remember shrieking with excitement. I didn’t care that college coaches historically struggled at the next level, I knew right then and there that Brad was the perfect man for the job. I couldn’t find my reaction on Twitter, but I was able to find my Facebook status from that day back when people actually used that shit

and safe to say everything we hoped and dreamed way back in 2013 is coming to fruition. Now the Celtics are currently at the hardest stage of this entire rebuild, now they actually have you ya know, win, but looking back to where this franchise was in the summer of 2013 to where they are now is the stuff they make movies about. Anyone who knows Wyc knows there are few things in life he likes more than talking about his role in forming the Big 3, well something tells me if the Celtics ever end up winning another title, we’ll hear all about his role in bringing in Brad. Hey when you’re cutting the checks you can say whatever you want in my opinion.

So thank you Doc. Thank you for being unwilling to go through another rebuild and forcing your way out West. Now if Wyc and Ainge could just sign Brad to a lifetime contract, we’ll be all set.