Finally Doc Rivers & Danny Ainge Disagree On The Timing Of Kendrick Perkins Trade

Celtics head coach Doc Rivers and their GM, Danny Ainge, aren’t on the same page regarding the Kendrick Perkins trade in late February.
After the trade went down, it wasn’t hard to see the Celtics were a different team because the big men who were on the roster who could replace Perk were an aging and injury prone duo of O’Neals.
Both Shaquille O’Neal and Jermaine O’Neal were battling injuries and never played the type of defense that Perk did for Boston.
Now, Rivers says he would have liked for the trade to have gone down after the season:

“Well, I would wait until after the year is over. I’ll put it that way. I do think Jeff Green has a chance to be a starter for us in the future and a hell of a basketball player. And Krstic can help. But making that trade at the time we made that trade, that made it very tough for us. And not only that, we added other pieces as well that we tried to fit in.
“It was just a lot of moving parts to a team that the advantage that we had was that we had continuity, everybody else was new. Chicago was new and the Heat were new. They couldn’t fall back on what we could fall back on with our starting five. Once we made that trade, we took that advantage away.” -Source

In other words, Ainge took that advantage away. Ainge will still tell anyone who listens, however, that he would trade Perk all over again:

“I don’t think that the presence of one player standing in the middle of the paint was going to [help] our offense score more, wasn’t going to prevent LeBron James from shooting step-back 3-point jump shots with Paul Pierce and Jeff Green draped all over him,” Ainge told Comcast SportsNet’s Greg Dickerson in a one-on-one interview.
“I mean, we scored zero points with four or five minutes to go in two games. That was not because of who we had playing center. That had a lot more to do with our best players not being able to score.”

He even goes on say this to anyone who questioned their toughness after the Perk trade:

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. We lose our toughness because we trade one player?” he said. “What do you think Kevin Garnett feels about that? What do you think Paul Pierce and Ray Allen and Rajon Rondo [feel about that]? Like, we only have one guy that’s a tough player, that brings an element of toughness?” -Source

I don’t know if Ainge knows this, but Perkins was the biggest guy on the court for the Celtics so that naturally makes him a little more intimidating then guys like Rajon Rondo and especially Ray Allen.
Point blank, Ainge was wrong to trade Perkins when he did, but he won’t admit it. He’ll throw out every reason in the book why it was a good move, but the results don’t lie.
He’s right about Perkins not being able to help their offense score more, but they wouldn’t have had to score as much if he was in the paint guarding their rim. Whether he likes it or not, he cost them a competitive advantage with the trade with the Thunder.