Even though the Boston Celtics essentially lost Gordon Hayward for an entire season and Kyrie Irving in the playoffs, everything still seems to fall into the right place.
But the Celtics likely would not have turned out to be this good with such an awesome bunch of youngsters had the Charlotte Hornets accepted a tasty deal Boston had cooked up for them back in 2015. That year, the Celtics offered Charlotte six future picks (four future-first rounders) in exchange for the Hornets’ No. 9 pick all because Boston had a thing with Justise Winslow. This was the story told by Bill Simmons during an episode of ESPN’s The Lowe Podcast.
I know the Pistons passed on it. Whatever it was eight, nine, 10. It was Pistons passed. They offered the same thing. They wouldn’t even talk about it, because they wanted to take Stanley Johnson.
The ninth pick was Charlotte. Jordan couldn’t figure it out in time and finally didn’t do it, so they passed on those four picks, one of which would have been Jaylen Brown. Another one would have been Rozier.
And then the 10th pick, they called Riley, and Riley just laughed and hung up on them. Riley was like, “No, I’m taking Justise Winslow. I’ll talk to you guys later.”
It was not made known which picks exactly the Celtics were willing to forego for the chance to get Justise Winslow, but Boston had the No. 16 and No. 28 pick in 2015 which they used to get Terry Rozier and R.J. Hunter, respectively. The Celtics also had the No. 3 (Jaylen Brown), No. 16 (Guerschon Yabusele), No. 23 (Ante Zizic) picks in 2016 and the No. 3 pick (Jayson Tatum) in 2017.
According to Simmons, the Detroit Pistons and the Miami Heat were also given the same offers by Boston but declined.
Hindsight is 20/20, but the Hornets, the Pistons, and the Heat have every reason to kick themselves in the head knowing the valuable pieces they could have gotten with those Boston picks.
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