From the outside, making trades seems easy. You plug names into a trade machine, you get a green checkmark that says it works, and you tell your friends about a deal you thought up that your favorite team should do.
In reality, it’s a bit tougher. Especially the part about telling the player that his life is being uprooted.
“I mean, (it was) really hard,” Brad Stevens said early Friday morning after officially completing the Kristaps Porzingis deal. “I said this at the start of the summer. I thought we needed to balance our roster and looked at the best ways to do that. And that meant that we were likely going to lose a really, really, really good player.”
That player happened to be Marcus Smart.
After nine seasons and nine playoff runs with Smart one of the team’s main cogs, Stevens had to call Smart this week and tell him he’s a Memphis resident now.
“It wasn't very long,” Stevens said of the conversation. “It was just your best chance to share your gratitude to him. Again, I think that because of these things and the sensitivity of these things and how many people talk about them and the wild speculation when something happens, it's hard to digest, it's hard to process.”
Smart was reportedly blindsided by the news. No one on the Celtics had embraced Boston quite like Smart. Of course, he’s had more time to do so than everyone else, having only played here over his nine-year career.
The business of professional sports is a cold one, though. Smart has seen friends and fan favorites get moved often. He saw nine different trades by Danny Ainge in his rookie year alone, the last of which brought in Isaiah Thomas to start a magical run of playoff appearances … only to end with the shocking trade for Kyrie Irving.
Smart has been through a lot in Boston. He’s been here for all but one year of Stevens’ tenure as coach and team President. And when a player like that gets moved, there's a message attached, intentional or otherwise. When a player many considered an unnamed captain is traded in the midst of his prime years, it lets players know no one is safe in pursuit of a championship.
“I don't really look at it that way,” Stevens said. “From our standpoint, we just look at what's our best opportunity to continue to grow and improve as a team, knowing that sometimes really, really hard decisions have to be made. Like I said, not only adding Kristaps with his skill, his size and his positional versatility, it's also we just had many more numbers and options at the smaller positions than we did with the bigs especially as we look forward to it. I thought it was good to do but hard to do.”
The overall trade value is hard to argue, at least on paper. Smart fetched two first-round picks, one of which has already been flipped into an interesting prospect and four second-rounders -- all valuable assets in this NBA economy. Porzingis is a former All-Star who played at an All-Star level last year and gives Boston a unique third scorer to take the pressure off Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
With the emergence of Derrick White last season, the Celtics clearly feel comfortable with him and, potentially, Malcolm Brogdon, running the show from the point. However, Brogdon was 91st in the NBA in assist percentage last season while White was 128th. Not exactly the highest-level distributors around. If the roster doesn’t change any further, the way Boston’s offense runs will.
“We’re going to need Derrick to continue to be great and we have no doubt that he will,” Stevens said. “But we have a lot of other capable guards too. Obviously Payton (Pritchard), Malcolm, Derrick, we’ve got a lot of good players back there. So that was, again, last year we had four really good players and we couldn’t get any time for Payton. And we just were maybe pretty thin as far as upfront (when) we went into some games with not having guys available.”
Smart was never untradeable. Very few players are. But he provided intangibles that were important for this team’s success. Unfortunately, he also contributed to enough of the team’s failures that strong enough arguments could be made for moving him, arguments with which Stevens ultimately agreed.
Smart was polarizing in Boston, to say the least. He triggers intense reactions on both sides of the conversation.
But it’s a conversation that's ending in Boston this summer.
“The greatest legacy you can leave is to be someplace and it’s better off because you were there. And I think that everybody here feels that way. I think that he will always be appreciated and thought of so fondly here for any number of reasons. Obviously everybody loved the way he plays and how hard he plays, but also his work in the community.
“We’re all really grateful to have had Marcus in our life for as long as we’ve had and are sad to see him go but know that he’s gonna have a huge impact on a really good Memphis team. So very difficult, very difficult conversations, really hard to do. But he’ll always have Boston for sure, right? I think Boston really appreciates him, and certainly I do, and he knows we’ll do anything for him. But, it was hard.”
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