The Kyrie/Isaiah Trade Went Down Two Years Ago Today, And It's Silly To Call It Anything Other Than A Failure
Of all the blogs I’ve written, few garnered more pushback than my initial take on the Isaiah/Kyrie trade. To keep it short, I hated it. Felt like it was a lateral move seeing as how we just witnessed what a 26/6 caliber point guard could do. I didn’t feel like it got the Celtics over the hump. I can be transparent, at the time and to this day I remain a huge Isaiah guy and I spent a large npart of that season arguing how he had elevated his play to the same PG tier as Kyrie. Not better. But they were equals after the 2016-17 season. You finish All NBA and a Top 5 MVP candidate, I feel like that’s not crazy.
Given everything that’s happened since that trade, everyone wants to talk about who won the trade. You can argue til you’re blue in the face as to who came out on top, and frankly I think it’s a stupid discussion mostly because it’s complicated. It was a trade Ainge had to make given Isaiah’s health and the potential to land a 26 year old stud point guard. He didn’t pay a huge price and was willing to accept the risk. Looking at it that way, I see why people may think he won the trade. Then you factor in the reality of how it all ended, and I can see how people could argue that the Celts lost.
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To me it’s all semantics. The one thing we can say for certain is now looking back two years later, the IT/Kyrie trade was a failure. That should be the main takeaway, not who won or lost. Even if you think the Celtics won the trade and is something you would do over again, that doesn’t change the reality that it was in the end, a big time failure. Let’s not forget what the expectations were when that trade went down. We as fans were expecting to compete for championships and make Finals appearances. That didn’t happen. We expected Kyrie to come in and be a killer postseason performer just like he was in CLE. That didn’t happen. We hoped and prayed that he would be the point guard of the future. That didn’t happen.
What we got was 2 years of fantastic regular season basketball from Kyrie, some of the best basketball of his career. That was the good part. He was fun to watch there’s no doubt. He also played a huge role in why the Celts were able to get the 2 seed and actually make a run to the ECF. Granted they did that without Kyrie, and you could argue that run actually helped poison last season, but we can be honest with the fact that they aren’t as good in 2017-18 without Kyrie.
We have no idea what Ainge would have done in terms of a contract offer for an injured Isaiah. We have no idea how Isaiah may have looked if he stayed in this system as he worked his way back. But the results of the trade where we actually had Kyrie for a playoff run were a second round exit in 5 games. You can’t convince me they couldn’t have done that without making the trade. Like I said when the trade first went down, it ended up being a lateral move. We also don’t know if Ainge maybe would have made other moves with those same assets like Zizic/Crowder/Nets pick in order to free up more burn for Tatum/Brown.
So if you want to die on the hill that the Celtics won the trade, that’s fine by me. Given their expectations and what actually happened I sort of disagree, but it’s whatever. The point is it didn’t work and the Celts are in no closer to a title today than they were two years ago. Hopefully after today we can officially be done with this whole topic, because we have a new point guard in town and he deserves our undivided attention.
