This past summer, the Toronto Raptors decided to take a big risk by acquiring superstar Kawhi Leonard in a blockbuster trade with the San Antonio Spurs.
The market was actually fairly limited for Leonard, as he had just one year left on his deal and was refusing to commit to any team that dealt for him.
The general consensus was that Leonard wanted Los Angeles, but the problem was, the San Antonio Spurs did not want to cave to Kawhi's demands, so they ended up sending him to freezing cold Toronto.
The Celtics had everything San Antonio wanted: cheap, young, cost-controlled talent and a wealth of draft picks that included first-rounders from the Sacramento Kings, Memphis Grizzlies and Los Angeles Clippers.
The first names that came up in trade rumors were Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, both of which were coming off of spectacular playoff runs and were on a meteoric rise.
But Boston, understanding the flight risk that came with Leonard, did not seem too keen on including either player in a trade for Leonard, particularly in the case of Tatum.
Ultimately, the Spurs moved on to the Raptors and accepted a trade centered around DeMar DeRozan, but had the C's put some of their young chips on the table, Kawhi would probably be wearing green right now.
Here is the question we must ask ourselves, though: was a Kyrie Irving-for-Kawhi swap ever on the table?
Irving by himself is certainly better than the entire package San Antonio received from Toronto for Leonard, so you would have to think that the Spurs—who expressed interest in Irving before he was dealt to Boston during the summer of 2017—would have absolutely been intrigued by the idea of a Kawhi-for-Kyrie swap.
Now, for the Celtics, they probably weren't ever planning on doing that. Perhaps the thought crossed Danny Ainge's mind, but his entire goal was likely to pair Irving with Leonard; not trade Irving for Leonard.
But should Ainge have done it?
I think one thing just about all of us can agree on is that Leonard is a superior player to Irving. As a matter of fact, Kawhi may very well be the best player in the league not named LeBron James.
It's difficult to find any area where Leonard does not excel, and his ability to play both ends of the floor on an almost unparalleled level would have made the Celtics absolutely lethal. Imagine a defensive group of Leonard, Tatum, Brown, Marcus Smart and Al Horford. My goodness.
The thing is, though, Leonard seems pretty dead set on heading out to California this summer, and even though there have been rumblings about Irving leaving Boston, he definitely seems like a better bet to stay with the C's than Leonard would have.
So, basically, Ainge would have been passing up the potential of having nearly a decade worth of Irving for one year of Leonard just to improve the team for one season.
Also, keep this in mind: it seems pretty obvious that Ainge's plan all along was to wait for Anthony Davis to become available and then pursue him, and now, here we are in March 2019, and the Celtics seem like the frontrunners to land Davis in a trade this summer.
Taking that into consideration, you can understand why Boston was not too wild on the idea of trading away Irving for one year of Leonard and robbing itself of the opportunity to put Kyrie and AD together in the process.
We can all sit here now and play armchair quarterback, but if Irving does end up re-upping with the Celtics this summer, it would make this whole discussion moot and prove that Boston did the right thing by not offering him up in a deal for Kawhi.
We also need to consider something else: as much as the Spurs would have loved to add Irving, wouldn't they also have been worried about him leaving over the summer?
It's hard to imagine that Kyrie would have stayed in San Antonio, so perhaps the Spurs would have ultimately preferred the more secure option of getting an established guy under contract in DeRozan plus some young talent and picks?
Again, we can romanticize the idea of Leonard on this current Celtics squad all we want, and the image is tantalizing, but it was never all that realistic, and it probably was not a good route or Boston to pursue regardless.
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