Trading for Kyrie Irving is something Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge will “never regret.”
Ainge says “there’s always risk in making deals,” and adds that Irving shouldn’t bear the brunt of the blame for Boston’s disappointing season.
Irving, 27, will be a unrestricted free agent this summer.
Per The Boston Herald:
“There’s always risk in making deals. We’re not afraid of risk,” Ainge said. “We made a risk by trading for Kyrie and, no matter what happens with Kyrie, I’ll never regret that. You just move on to the next deal.”
Ainge isn’t saying that he’s moving on from Irving, whose potential destinations have left pins across a map of the NBA from New York to Los Angeles.
“The first thing I would say about the whole Kyrie thing, it’s unfortunate that one person gets credit or blame for a team’s failures,” said Ainge. “We had a lot of reasons the team did not succeed this year. Kyrie deserves his share of the blame, but not any more than anybody else. There’s a lot of guys that didn’t handle things the right way and didn’t make the sacrifices that needed to be done for the benefit of the team. So I think that they’re all going to learn from it, including Kyrie. He’s still a young player, and I think Kyrie is going to come back even better next year.”
And then there’s the biggest unknown of all – what it will take to convince Irving that he should remain a Celtic.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” said Ainge. “I don’t know that yet.”
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