Boston Celtics: What if Paul Pierce had been traded for Chris Paul?

The Boston Celtics almost started anew in 2005 by trading Paul Pierce for Chris Paul. Would the Celtics still become contenders with CP3 running the show?

The Boston Celtics nearly traded Paul Pierce for Chris Paul on the night of the 2005 NBA Draft. In fact, the deal was so close, there was an ad ready to run in the next day’s Boston Globe with a picture of Paul saying “A New Era”, according to ESPN‘s Jackie MacMullan in her appearance on the Lowe Post Podcast.

Had the trade gone through, would the Celtics still be contending for titles in the same time frame? Would they be contending at all?

The Celtics’ lone championship year in 2008 was also the first year of Chris Paul’s nine consecutive All-Star appearances, starting in Paul’s third year in the league (age-22 season). It didn’t take long for Chris Paul to jam himself into the yearly MVP conversation on the grounds that he made the then-New Orleans Hornets relevant.

Paul already had all the tools on offense, as did Pierce, but Paul possessed the rare quality that only the most elite point guards can have — the ability to make their teammates better, not to mention that Paul was already a world class defender. Before we look at what Paul would’ve been able to do, we need to think back to what made that era of Celtics basketball great to begin with.

It’s no secret that the most vital reason for the Celtics’ success in that “Big 3” era was the arrival of Kevin Garnett. In theory, all the same pieces could have been in place to make the KG and Ray Allen trades if Paul Pierce had been traded for the rights to draft Chris Paul straight up.

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I mean, it’s possible, but not probable. In 2006-07, Paul and the Hornets had a 39-43 record with a lousy supporting cast. In Boston, Pierce only played 47 games, and the Celtics finished 24-58. Their terrible record was important, however, because the subsequent fifth overall pick was used to get Ray Allen out of Seattle.

If Chris Paul was a Celtic that year, would they have been too good to get that fifth pick? It seems more than possible that they would be, in which case they may have needed a new strategy to lure Kevin Garnett.

Let’s say that the Ray Allen trade happens regardless. How sure are we that Garnett would still waive his no-trade clause to play for Boston? Well, one of the lesser-known factors of Garnett’s persuasion to be traded was the influence of Chauncey Billups and Tyronn Lue. The Boston Globe documented some of Garnett’s conversations with them back in 2007, outlining Garnett’s concern for turning his back on the city of Minnesota.

“Then, KG asked me, ‘What about the city?’ I said, ‘You don’t go out anyway, so it doesn’t matter. You don’t go out of the house. You could play in Alaska.’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ ”

-Chauncey Billups

Billups and Lue both told Garnett that he was better off heading to a team with two All-Stars, and while Lue did mention Pierce and Allen by name as reasons to join up, it didn’t seem like it mattered exactly which All-Stars awaited Garnett, but more the fact that they had any such players to team up with.

Now, does a Big 3 of Paul, Garnett, and Allen still win at least one championship, and then go on to contend (and possibly win) more? I’d say the answer is pretty easily “yes,” but there is one way to make the case for “no”: Chris Paul wasn’t sick of losing yet. He’d only been in the league for three seasons prior to the Garnett trade, and while Paul is intensely competitive, it’s hard to say that he would have been as perfect a fit as Pierce was in that scenario.

If we’re going by stats and general fit, then I’d say those Celtics are pretty easily contenders. They might even still have CP3 to this very day (Paul still hasn’t played as many NBA seasons total as Pierce played with Boston).

Admittedly, I haven’t figured out how Rondo fits in, if he does at all, so it might make the most sense that he gets traded pretty early on in this timeline, for no other reason than that I’m 85 percent sure Rondo and Paul would try to murder each other over the minutia of how to properly run an NBA offense.

The real shake-up in all this is that if Paul never plays a game for the Hornets, “basketball reasons” likely never happens in 2011, when David Stern vetoed a trade that would send Paul to the Lakers citing, “basketball reasons”.

The funny thing about that can of worms is that Boston, again, was one of the teams with an offer on the table, which involved Rajon Rondo, the player least likely to be able to co-exist with Paul and Jeff Green, who Boston had already traded once in the form of the fifth overall pick in the deal that brought Ray Allen over.

Instead, the Hornets settled on a deal that gave them Minnesota’s unprotected first-rounder in 2012, which they used to select Anthony Davis first overall. Say, do you think the draft order was ever rigged? Asking for a friend.

Ultimately, I think this whole thought experiment lends more validity to the idea that loyalty in the NBA is an illusion. Pierce was almost a Hornet (and was eventually traded anyway), Kobe Bryant was almost a Piston, and Tim Duncan almost went to the Magic. Such is the case for almost every superstar – they almost ended up somewhere else, even when their last name was synonymous with the city they represented.

Next: 2017-18 Week 22 NBA Power Rankings

They say the NBA is a business, which is true, but never underestimate the power of a narrative. Sometimes it makes all the difference in the end, when we reminisce about championships that were won and jersey numbers that were retired.