As the NBA training camps for the 2014-15 season open, it is a good time to take stock and assess where the Celtics rebuilding effort is at. The proper place to start is not 2013 with the trade of Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, but to go back two years, to the summer of 2012.

The fifth year of the Big Three era had just ended, and by all rights the Celtics should have been planning to enter a full rebuild mode. The 37-year-old Ray Allen and 36-year-old Kevin Garnett were unrestricted free agents, along with Brandon Bass and Jeff Green, and it was time to move on, clear capspace, accrue young players and draft picks, and commence the same sort of visionary rebuild Danny Ainge had launched in 2003 upon taking the job.

It did not look to be a fast turnaround. The Celtics had two no. 1 picks in 2012, but both picks were deep in the round, and they had no additional no. 1 picks in subsequent years. Nor did the team have a lot of assets. A full-throttle rebuild could hardly have been an appealing prospect to Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, or, especially, coach Doc Rivers.

So Ainge elected not to rebuild. The Celtics had a mediocre regular season in 2011-12, but the team blossomed in the playoffs, winning two series and taking the eventual champion Heat to seven games in the Eastern Conference finals. The backcourt of Rondo and Avery Bradley looked intriguing, and their defense combined with that of KG looked championship caliber. If the Celtics could take the champs to 7 games in the ECF, how might they do if they picked up a couple of free agents, saw Bradley improve, and got Jeff Green back from his heart surgery? Ainge decided to go all-in. There were no protests from anywhere in Celtics Nation. The taste of the playoffs was far too sweet to willfully abandon, even if the hopes of an actual title were remote.

In the summer of 2012 Ainge made a series of whirlwind moves dedicated to immediate success and with no concern for any eventual rebuild. Short of trading future no. 1 picks—Ainge is no dummy—all resources were applied to winning in the here and now. Ainge:

- signed Garnett to a three year $30 million deal, that would take him to his 39th birthday

- signed the 35-year-old (and rapidly fading) Jason Terry to a three-year $16 million with the MLE slot

- was surprised when Ray Allen rejected the large three-year offer from the Celtics to accept a much lower two-year deal with the Heat; this was not a good sign

- to compensate for losing Allen, made a complicated sign-and-trade deal including three future no. 2 picks to acquire Courtney Lee and a four-year $21 million contract

- signed Brandon Bass, a reserve forward, to a three-year, $20 million deal

- signed Jeff Green to a four-year, $36 million deal

When the dust cleared Ainge had added a lot of guaranteed salary for the subsequent three seasons, and two of the deals went a fourth year. None of the deals, except perhaps that of Green, made any sense unless a team was playing for all the marbles now, or was convinced global warming would lead sea levels to rise 10 feet by 2015.

It was not long into the 2012-13 season that most of the above deals began to smell like month-old fish left out on the kitchen counter. Terry sucked. Lee sucked. Bass and Green were overpaid. Garnett and Pierce still had game, but they were past their prime. Bradley battled nagging injuries. The team had no chance of playing with the contending teams in the league. Any hope had been dashed in January when the team’s best player, Rajon Rondo, tore his ACL and would be out the rest of the season, and half of the following season as well. The one exciting development, rookie no. 1 pick Jared Sullinger, had season-ending back surgery around the same time. The skies were dark in Boston.

So by May 2013 there was no debate over whether the Celtics should launch a full rebuild; it was the only option available. So there was Ainge with a mess largely of his own making. Untradeable contracts. Salary cap leaving little or no maneuverability before 2015 at the earliest, and probably 2016, barring deals for Green and Lee. A depleted number of no. 2 picks, thanks to the Lee deal. And his only keepers on the roster looking ahead to when the team might contend again—Rondo, Sullinger, Bradley and Green—all had serious injury concerns, and only Rondo was a clearly above-average player. No one else on the roster had a future with the team.

In short, in May 2013 the Celtics were entering a full rebuild with little in the way of assets. One suspects that very few, if any, other teams in the league would have traded rosters and future draft picks with the Celtics. It was that bad.  

Rivers saw the imminent demise and wanted no part of a series of 28-54 seasons that might lead to another series of 28-54 seasons. He had been through two rebuilds in his coaching career and that met his quota. Generally regarded as one of the premier coaches in the game—and beloved by his veteran players as well as the fans—he did not need to do the rebuild thing anymore. But he was under contract, so he could not just take another job without the Celtics getting compensation. Ainge traded Rivers to the Clippers for a 2015 no. 1 pick. The rebuild had begun. There was a 180 degree shift in direction for the franchise.

Next up were Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. With Rivers' exit, they had to ask themselves whether they wanted to do the rebuild thing during their last two or three years in the league as they were entering their late 30s. The answer was no. But what could Ainge get for these two aging superstars? Pierce only had one year left on his max-contract deal, while Garnett had two more years, but he was talking about retirement. Ainge faced the distinct prospect of just releasing them or letting anyone take them who would swallow their contracts and send him back an expiring deal. He certainly had no place for them on a rebuilding team; they might help win enough games to cost the Celtics a high lottery pick, and for what? At best, Ainge might get a contender to send a future lottery-protected no. 1 pick for each of them. Even then, as one perused the NBA rosters in June 2013 there were not many options discernible. Perhaps none.

At this point, the skies opened, the sun shined through, and Red Auerbach smiled down on the Celtics. It just so happened that the New Jersey cum Brooklyn Nets wanted to make a big splash. GM Billy King thought adding Garnett and Pierce to a line-up of Derek Williams, Joe Johnson and Brook Lopez would vault the Nets to elite contender status. That acquiring the huge contracts would give the Nets a payroll comparable to the senior executives at Goldman Sachs—with a massive luxury tax bill that could subsidize the Newark, New Jersey public school system—was of no apparent concern to Mikhail Prokhorov.

King’s thesis was not necessarily wrong; the devil came in working out the details of the deal. King was negotiating against himself to acquire KG and Pierce. There was no market otherwise. Once Ainge realized King was committed to getting Pierce and Garnett at any cost, he made a deal for the ages. The Celtics traded Garnett, Pierce, and the execrable Jason Terry to the Nets for the expiring deals of Kris Humphries and MarShon Brooks, the three-year entirely unguaranteed deal of Keith Bogans, and the one bad contract in the mix: Gerald Wallace’s $10 million per year deal that extended through 2016.  The Celtics also got a $10.7 million trade exception, which was put to good use. They also got some draft picks, which I turn to below.

Taking Wallace’s dreadful contract wasn’t that big of a deal for the Celtics, because thanks to Ainge’s contracts from the summer of 2012, there would not be any appreciable capspace until 2015 or 2016 anyway, so nabbing major free agents was not a big concern. If, in the summer of 2015, Ainge wanted to shed Wallace’s final $10 million to clear capspace, he could use the stretch provision to pay Wallace $3.3 million annually for three years.

So what did Ainge get by, in effect, taking Wallace’s contract off of the Nets hands? When one includes how Ainge parlayed Humphries, Bogans and the trade exception, this is what he has gotten (so far) in return for the deal:

- Tyler Zeller

- Marcus Thornton (deal expires in 2015)

- Dwight Powell

- Brooklyn Nets 2014 No. 1 pick—James Young

- Brooklyn Nets 2016 unprotected No. 1 pick

- Brooklyn Nets 2018 unprotected No. 1 pick

- Boston right to swap 2017 No. 1 picks with Brooklyn; if Boston does so, Brooklyn gets Boston’s 2017 No. 2 pick

- Cleveland top-10 protected 2016 No. 1 pick

- Cleveland 2016 No. 2 pick

- Cleveland 2017 No. 2 pick

- Washington top-49 protected 2015 No. 2 pick

- $4.3 million trade exception (through July 2015)

- $5.3 million trade exception (through September 2015)

When one adds in the 2015 Clippers No. 1 pick for Doc Rivers, and the 2015 and 2016 Philadelphia No. 2 picks as well as the 2016 Miami No. 2 pick that were acquired in small part for MarShon Brooks (as part of a deal including Jordan Crawford and Joel Anthony), this is a rather extraordinary haul. And, of course, the Celtics have all their own no. 1 picks going forward. In the next four seasons, the Celtics have eight No. 1 picks and eight, possibly nine, No. 2 picks. And that doesn’t include Young and Zeller and the trade exceptions that remain and should be parlayed into more players or draft picks.

The exact value of this haul will be determined by where Brooklyn’s draft picks land and how well Ainge drafts or uses these assets in trades. If Brooklyn descends into the deep lottery, which is possible, this trade could boggle the mind; it will become the stuff of legends. Even if Brooklyn stays out of the lottery, what remains undeniable is this: Danny Ainge has a pile of assets like almost no other rebuilding team in the league. And, if he chooses, he will have a considerable capspace, too, by 2016. He could even have a lot of space in 2015 if he wished to maneuver to create it.

Ainge has done some other housekeeping as well besides the great Brooklyn heist and its aftershocks. He hired Brad Stevens to replace Doc, and the preliminary returns are glowing; he seems the ideal coach for a rebuild. Ainge moved up three spots to grab Kelly Olynyk with the 13th pick in the 2013 draft. In 2014 he took Marcus Smart with the 6th pick overall, and James Young with the 17th pick overall. These look like keepers, though the jury is out to varying degrees on all of them. Ainge picked up Vitor Faverani form Europe. He dumped Courtney Lee’s contract at the cost of shipping out a future no. 2 pick. Slowly the assets pile is getting larger, and the debit pile is shrinking. When the 2015 season concludes, Bass, Joel Anthony—who came in the MarShon Brooks/Jordan Crawford deal and it the reason why the Celtics got those three second round picks— and Marcus Thornton will be off the books, and Gerald Wallace will be the last negative contract around.

There are far too many variables to predict how the Celtics will do in 2014-15, or when the team might return to legitimate contention, but this much is clear: Since Ainge made his 180 in May 2013, he has done a remarkable job of implementing a serious rebuild and putting the Celtics in a position to succeed. That means the future is less up to chance and more under the control of the Celtics. At this point, that is the best we can hope for.