I am not often given to quoting Scripture in this space, but tonight it seems appropriate. In Proverbs Chapter 11 Verse 29, there is an eloquent bit of advice from King Solomon, it reads: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind and the fool shall be the servant of the wise at heart." Unfortunately, Danny Ainge probably didn't read that particular passage before he dealt Antoine Walker to the Mavericks in 2003.

Tonight has just provided the culmination of the Boston Celtics inheriting the wind from that bad trade. I predicted (one of the very few instances where I have been correct) that the Celtics would lose out on the Oden-Durant sweepstakes. I didn't dare hope, however, that they would fall all the way to 5th in this year's draft. This team earned this karmic suplex by making bad choice after bad choice and then compounding the affront to good taste that was this season by tanking games down the stretch.

Why did Danny Ainge deserve a chance to derail the career of Greg Oden or Kevin Durant? Because he's honestly submitted his best effort at producing a winning team in his four seasons at the helm? Because he conducted himself as a model of professional decorum? Because the two best things about his reign are the creation of a cheerleading squad and unloading Raef LaFrentz? It never ceases to amaze me that this man is still employed. I could work 2 hours a week and do a better job than he's done. Hell, the monkeys at the zoo could do a better job and still have plenty of time to fling feces at one another.

Take a look at the Celtics trades under Ainge. This list of transactions made by the team since he took over basketball operations is an appalling roster of ill-conceived decisions. Since when has it been advisable to shuffle players in and out of an organization? And yet it's the Ainge MO. So the question lingers for Celtics fans: do you want Ainge to use the pick or trade it?

They traded the rights to Randy Foye to Portland for Sebastian Telfair and the carcase of Theo Ratliff (who earned $1 million for every four minutes of basketball he played this season), Foye went on to earn a place on the NBA All Rookie Team. Portland turned around and traded Foye for the rights to Brandon Roy who won the Rookie of the Year award. Telfair is going to be cut from the team because his play was sub-par and his off-court behavior unacceptable. So that's what Ainge can do with a draft pick when it comes time to trade.

Among the veterans he has managed to acquire include Ratliff, Chris Mills and Raef LaFrentz. Ainge has managed to come out on the winning end of a trade once, when Gary Payton refused to report to Atlanta after the Cs traded him for Antoine Walker. When the Hawks cut Payton, he returned to the Celtics. So does that inspire confidence that the Celtics could somehow trade a pick that will not become Oden or Durant in a package with Pierce or one of their young players for Garnett or Gasol or Jermaine O'Neal or some mystery player who might not suck as a Celtic?

I have found myself wondering lately whether Ainge's determination to get into one-sided trades which have benefited the Trail Blazers at the expense of the Celtics have some connection to the shameful manner in which he stabbed the Blazers in the back in 1992. In case you have forgotten the story, Ainge (an Oregon native, by the way) was on the Blazers as the 1991-92 season ended and was due to be a free agent.

He promised the team and the fans he wanted to stay and would contact the team to make the necessary arrangements. And then, all of a sudden, on the very first day of the signing period, Ainge came to terms with the Phoenix Suns. I am all for clearing one's conscience and atoning for past transgressions, but I must say I hate to see the Boston Celtics serve as a vehicle to help their GM help a team he shafted 15 years ago.

Then there is the fact that some player from the Roy Hibbert, Joakim Noah, Al Horford, Brandan Wright, Corey Brewer or Yi Jianlian mix will be available in the fifth spot. I have heard as many times as you have that this is a ridiculously deep draft. Maybe I'm stubborn (I'm not alone, my man in Maine emailed me tonight to complain that this draft isn't what it's been billed to be), but I'm not convinced.

Roy Hibbert is a project. He may be great, and for the sake of the league he'd better be great. Greg Oden needs a rival like I need to marry a beautiful heiress. But Hibbert's not going to come in right away and dominate. Frankly, I'm barely willing to believe that he can come in and contribute. Think Emeka Okafor with a steeper learning curve, and I think you'll have a good picture of what Hibbert's future is going to be for two, maybe three years.

I have expressed my distaste for Joakim Noah's ability to play in the NBA a number of times in this space. He's not big enough to play NBA big men. He's not quick enough to hang with a Nowitzki or a Bargniani. He's nowhere near polished enough to score from the perimeter, and he handles the rock like a wildebeast calf on ice. Joakim Noah will be the death (certainly from a career stand point, and maybe literally also) of an NBA GM. I don't want it to be Ainge, though, as the Cs would be stuck with Noah, or Acie Earl with less marketability and talent.

Horford is probably the best of this sorry lot, provided you want a player to come in and help a team win games in the near term (of course one wonders whether NBA teams really want to win based on their personnel choices). The problem here is that he seems to be a more athletic version of Al Jefferson. Al has impressed a lot of Cs fans and the reporters who cover the team, but I still believe he's at his ceiling right now. Adding another power forward named Al won't help him. Plus, as much as I like his game, I don't think he's worth half of what the number five pick in this draft will earn.

Brandan Wright is a great unknown. He has all the potential any basketball fan could dream of, but he isn't seasoned enough to be the face of a franchise. To my way of thinking that's what the Cs need more than anything right now. They have too many young players with potential trying to develop into solid pros as it is, one more guy like this isn't going to help the team, especially when they're in salary cap hell and there aren't enough minutes and shots to go around.

I don't know enough about Yi Jianlian to offer any kind of assessment of his game. Beyond hearing that he's a Chinese Dirk Nowitzki on Outside the Lines the other day, I know nothing about him. I can spell his name only because I have today's Globe sitting on the desk in front of me. I do know that Yao Ming is monstrously overrated. He's an adequate big man benefiting from the total lack of centers in today's NBA. He ought to be able to score 30 points a night when he's 7 inches taller than 95% of the guys trying to cover him. So I would be inclined to stay away from another Chinese player, considering how much money goes to a #5 pick.

Corey Brewer captured the attention of fans across the country with his defensive play in this year's NCAA tournament (and last year too, but I try not to face the fact that Florida won two consecutive championships). This instantly makes him the most NBA ready guard of his generation. It's a little knows fact, but if you can handle Aaron Afflalo and Mike Conley Jr., then you can shut down any player on any team at any time. I bet you Iverson is soiling his drawers at the prospect of facing Brewer as we speak. Give me a break, he's not ready for prime time. At least not for $50 million.

And that is why I am so happy tonight. The lottery was Danny Ainge's last shot at keeping his job beyond this season. He can't keep getting chances to ruin what little future this franchise has. Maybe Jefferson, West, Rondo, Perkins, Powe, Gomes and the rest are better than I think. Maybe they're a lot better. But with the group of them competing for minutes, touches and shots there is no way that this group of players can form a team. They need leadership, and the team has no pieces to trade to get value in return.

This situation is so very perfect for Ainge. He traded Walker and then gradually had to punt away the magic beans he got in return. And even better, he acquired Telfair in his scramble to get out from under that Walker trade and that blew up in his face. He traded for Ricky Davis only to give up on him a little over a year later. In short, he created a hell of a lot of trouble in his own house and he just inherited the wind losing this lottery.

And if you aren't miserable enough, Celtics fans, just think... Portland got Brandon Roy thanks to the Cs terrible draft day trade last year. Now they have the inside track on Oden even though they had a 5.3% chance to win the lottery. At least the Cs threw one hell of a lottery party at Clery's on Dartmouth Street. I couldn't quite make it, I still remember a time when the Celtics didn't throw parties for anything short of a title.

Ever since the incompetent tools who named themselves Banner 17 took over the Boston Celtics and entrusted the most storied franchise in professional basketball to a man who dabbles in brain typing, I never thought I'd look forward to a Celtic win streak. But now that the team has followed its epic losing epidemic with a nice four game win streak, I am surprised that I am happy. It makes things so much more interesting for me.

With Greg Oden and Kevin Durant all but locks to go 1 and 2 in the draft this year, it seemed like even the immortal Danny Ainge could not find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory this time out. But if the mishmash of spare parts that is this edition of the Boston Celtics wins enough games, the Celtics could lose for winning. Imagine what Ainge could do with the third pick after the two mortal locks are gone. I can't believe it, but since I am almost certain the ownership group won't pull their heads from their rear ends and terminate the contract of Mr. Ainge, I'm rooting for the Celtics to win enough to lose the lottery.

One more bad draft will cost Ainge his job. It has to. Or at least it would be a mortal lock, but then I'd have to assume the cretins who run the Celtics are not as incompetent than I think they are. Against all odds, Ainge has seemed positively bulletproof in his capacity as Celtics GM. Of course, I've been attacking him for the nearly 11 months that I've been writing this blog but since somewhere on the order of 20 people read this space on a very good day, I attract only so much attention.

But the tide has turned, it seems. First, about two weeks ago, Jackie MacMullan had an excellent piece in the Globe detailing the appalling state of the franchise's business plan. I might not know very much about running a business, but I know that when your business is winning basketball games and your team is losing much more than it wins, you're not running a good business. When you run a team in a salary cap system and you're $11 million over the cap, you're not doing the right thing. Unfortunately, when both things are true of your franchise, basketball isn't the business for you.

I have been attacking Ainge for the Walker-LaFrentz deal strictly from a basketball standpoint. He took away one of the core pieces of a team that had reached the conference finals for the first time in over 10 years and received an inconsistent center more comfortable on the perimeter than the block and a terrible defender to boot. Much worse than that, Antoine was due to make just over $28 million over the two years left on his contract at the time while Raef was signed for six years and due to earn almost $63 million.

It seems like a strange decision to make as a general manager of a basketball team. I don't understand why you'd trade a better player due to earn less money over a shorter time for a worse player due to earn more money over a longer time (yeah, other players were involved, but these two were the centerpieces). Maybe if Jiri Welsch panned out, it would have been different. But then, to paraphrase an old saying, if grasshoppers were armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, birds wouldn't make such a habit of eating them. Of course, we all know how the Jiri Welsch era in Celtics history worked. He wore number 44 (as Danny Ainge did in his time in Boston), and that's about it.

One would have to admire the tenacity with which the Celtics ownership group has stuck by Ainge if one did not want to see a winning team play in the TD Banknorth facility (I still won't call it a garden). I imagine I should clarify that last statement by adding the caveat that said winner should happen to be the home team. After all, a number of winning teams have helped the Celtics to the worst home record in the NBA.

I thoroughly enjoyed this quote from Steve Pagliuca from the MacMullan piece:

You can't make a judgement on Danny right now. It's only been four years. If Delonte becomes Bibby and Al Jefferson becomes Karl Malone, I'd say Danny Ainge has done pretty well.

Where should I begin with this gem? First, the Founding Fathers believed that four years was ample time to evaluate the President's job performance. General manager of a basketball team is a serious responsibility, much more difficult than running a nation. Second, it might have escaped Pagliuca's notice, but I did some serious research on Karl Malone and Mike Bibby. You might not know this, but neither one of them has won a championship in the NBA. Bibby has never even made it to an NBA Finals.

The problem with that statement is that taking a wait and see approach in the fourth year of an ongoing rebuilding process that seems to be stuck in reverse is about as effective as the ostrich who sticks its head into the sand to escape a predator (as far as I know, that is a myth, but still an enduring and appropriate image here. Also, there is no indication that Al Jefferson will become dominant. Finally, with the way Bibby fell off the face of the Earth these last two seasons, I wouldn't wish that on Delonte West. Actually, I would since I want the Cs to lose, but one of the owners shouldn't, unless he's using a losing franchise as a tax write off like the lady from Slap Shot.

In case you care, Theo Ratliff is the third highest paid Celtic, and the who earned a little bit over $1 million for every four minutes of basketball he played this season. His final total came to a whopping 44 minutes before he called it quits for the season. Four and five on the list of highest paid Celtics are Kendrick Perkins and Brian Scalabrine respectively. Between the three of them, they earn just over $19 million. For those of you who don't do much math, that's just south of 40% of the salary cap. For those of you who might be a bit slow on the uptake 40% of the Celtics salary cap is devoured by a carcase who can only charitably called a has-been, a damn good third center in Perkins (too bad they don't have a number 1 or 2 center) paid damn good starter money and Brain (not a typo, deliberate error) Scalabrine.

Bill Simmons was disappointed by the lack of trades at this season's trading deadline. I was unpleasantly surprised. As I'm sure you must have noticed because the media covered it thoroughly, there was no way a big deal was going to be made unless a third team stepped up to get hosed. Ainge did that to facilitate the Rasheed Wallace trade to Detroit in 2004. Maybe he learned his lesson.

I thought this passage from his the trade deadline piece was interesting:

BOSTON: F
I'm relieved they didn't do anything -- especially a Pau Gasol-Al Jefferson deal, which would have been an enormous mistake when you consider the age difference (five years), the salaries (Gasol makes six times as much), the stats (Jefferson's a better rebounder, and they're equally mediocre defenders, so they would have been picking up an extra 4-5 points a game and that's it) and the fact that Gasol could have inadvertently knocked them out of the Greg Oden/Kevin Durant Sweepstakes.

Still, I'm giving them a retroactive "F" for the hideous Sebastian Telfair trade, in which they passed on Brandon Roy or Randy Foye to acquire a shoot-first point guard who can't shoot. I know they saved $20-25 million in the deal (a big consolation for my dad, who's paying something like $360 a game for his seats) and acquired Theo Ratliff's eight-figure contract as a potential trade chip ... but Danny Ainge hasn't swung a deal in four-plus years that could be considered a home run, much less a triple or double (I'll give him a single on the first Ricky Davis trade), but he managed to hit into two triple plays (the Telfair deal and the Raef LaFrentz/Antoine Walker deal). Will Danny be able to parlay Ratliff's contract into something substantial? I'm dubious.

I give you the passage because it reminded me of something I wrote just after the draft. The date on my post was July 3, 2006. I questioned the wisdom of choosing Telfair over Roy/Foye. I don't mean to allege or imply that Simmons reads this space, I'm just saying that I knew this back in July. Why didn't he?

I do attack him a bit in the blog, so I guess I also must give credit where it is due. His retrospective on Dennis Johnson was excellent.