Ainge Emotional Over Trade

February 24, 1989

In the morning, he went out for a haircut. Then a few calls to friends in California for information about his sudden need for a house and a school in Sacramento. A trip over to Boston University to ensure that his credits there will be transferred to Brigham Young and a meeting with a realtor here, for the present house must be sold. Details. Sudden details.

Last night Danny Ainge watched a bit of the Celtics game from Hartford against Milwaukee, but not all of it. "I wanted to spend some time with my children," said Ainge, "because last night was my last chance for a while to be with them." Today he is off to Sacramento.

Professional sports are a business, Ainge spoke the traded player's cliche once again, but even if he had been halfway expecting a trade since last summer, "this really hit me emotionally. I wasn't totally surprised to be traded . . . but sometimes you don't realize the depth of the attachments you have made." The attachment flows two ways.

Danny Ainge will be missed. He came to play every game. He played with enthusiasm. He played with verve. Danny Ainge played basketball; seldom was there a sense that basketball was a job.

"I felt I always gave it my best effort," said Ainge, a day after being dealt with Brad Lohaus to the Kings for Joe Kleine and Ed Pinckney. "I feel I'm the type of player who has to give his best to succeed, since I don't have the talent to take an opponent lightly and still succeed. There's a difference between playing hard and playing with a love for the game. I tried to always play with that emotion, that enthusiasm, that love for the game, because I really felt I wouldn't rather be doing anything else than playing basketball."

Ainge came back to the same theme several times. About playing hard, which he said these Celtics are, and about playing with a love for the game, which perhaps these Celtics are not. Could this be a reason the Celtics have fallen further than they should have without Larry Bird?

"First of all, I want to say coach Jimmy Rodgers has done a great job holding the team together," said Ainge. "I also thought that everybody was playing hard and I thought Jimmy has done a great job in seeing that we did. But I just don't sense the same attitude that we had in the past."

The same "attitude"?

"The sense of everybody pulling for everybody else," replied Ainge.

Here Ainge went through a long list of Celtic cheerleaders and reserves from the past, from M.L. Carr to Cedric Maxwell, from Jerry Sichting to Greg Kite and Rick Carlisle and Quinn Buckner and on and on. "There was just a great team spirit that came from these guys, a confidence and an attitude that was there in practice and which came through in the game. Everybody was pulling for everybody else."

Perhaps that attitude comes from winning, and perhaps that attitude is more difficult to come by when there are so many new and young faces on the team, said Ainge. "But everybody used to get along with everybody," he said. "Now the team is split into three or four groups, and I'm not saying players don't get along with each other, but before there was only one group."

Again Ainge came back to the theme that there is a difference between playing hard and playing with a love for playing. "Now the Celtics are giving a great effort," he said, "but the emotion . . . there's a real difference between playing hard and playing with that love for the game. It just doesn't feel the same.

"I don't know . . . maybe that attitude comes from winning and maybe they'll be able to bring it back once Larry comes back. But that camaraderie we used to have . . . it wasn't there."

Ainge always will be a Celtic at heart. Asked how he felt these Celtics would do when and if Bird returns to the lineup, Ainge said, "I can't personally see them winning the championship, but I'll be rooting very hard for them to do it."

He again spoke highly of Rodgers and said too much was made of Ainge's three-point shots or Rodgers' decision to have Ainge come off the bench. "Jimmy and I talked about that before it happened, and I agreed with the decision," said Ainge. "With the lack of scoring production we had off the bench last year, we thought that I'd probably get more quality time this way. And that's the way it worked out. I was scoring more points this year while playing eight minutes a game less."

What he will miss most, said Ainge, are the friendships with the Celtics, "especially with my close friends and Jimmy." And if Ainge spoke so warmly of just being with the Celtics, of just being around Kevin McHale, of how the highlight of his career "was the '86 championship season," his happiest moment came much earlier.

"My greatest memory of them all and the most excited I ever was came the day I signed with the Celtics," said Ainge. "That gave me so much pride . . . to be with the Celtics."

A pride that Danny Ainge never allowed to wane. He played for the Celtics, but he always played as if he loved to play for the Celtics. Which was the truth.