Danny Ainge Quotations

With the NBA scheduling, a lot of times it puts the onus on teams traveling. You play Utah one night and a team like Phoenix is resting and waiting for you the next night. That's tough. So you run into some circumstances like that more, it seems, on the road than you do at home.

I'm always talking about Ryan and how we haven't been able to give him time. Well, this is our chance to get a good look at him.

He'll be with us when training camp opens.

He can play defense at that position, and he can score. He is a playground legend in Chicago.

I think the blame is on everybody. But if you can't improve defensively, if you can't improve in limiting turnovers, then you need a change in personnel.

I think we have guys who can do the job.

I think that Doc is a guy that can be with the same group for a long time because I feel that the young players today need a tough-minded coach. They need to practice. They need to watch film. I think that he's going to be better next year than this year.

I think we can be more efficient in some ways, especially offensively. Wally is such an efficient player, he scores with fewer shots.

Marcus Banks had three years here, to play, and he had three coaches (Jim O'Brien, John Carroll, Doc Rivers) that weren't real excited about him. I think Marcus is a good player, but I don't think (there was) impatience, certainly not like a Joe Johnson or Chauncey Billups situation, you know, rookie players that were very high (draft) picks.

We don't care what number we're at. We may be at 18 when it's all said and done. Somebody's going to make the team and somebody's not. Obviously, you can only have 15 contracts Opening Day, so we'll see who's still standing and who wins the jobs.

Things like that don't bother me. Just one week ago, Paul said he wanted to play his whole career in one uniform. It's important for us to keep all our players in the right frame of mind, and it would be great if everyone felt good about everything for the whole year. But that's not the way the NBA season works. All I know is I talk to Paul and he tells me he wants to keep together and get better.

Not right away. But we could be looking at the possibility of a 10-day contract guy.

I have no plans to trade Paul Pierce.

In Wally we are receiving an All-Star player who is playoff-tested and who has been a winner at all levels.

I think 2 1/2 years of evaluating and watching practice every day and watching Ricky's performance on and off the court and in the locker room and everything else, we felt it was better to look in a different direction.

He's still coming. But we haven't gotten it finalized. They understandably have a lot of more important things on their minds.

Gerald is still a major, major priority for us on the developmental side. We plan on bringing him back this season.

I felt that the other way was not working, and I felt this was a logical direction for us to go. Even though it's not a finished product, and this isn't the trade where we're all of a sudden we're going to win the division, it is a good trade for both teams for where they were, which was underachieving.

I can make a trade every day if I want to, but that's not going to help us. A trade that would get us better rarely comes along. They're very difficult to find. Good trades are very difficult in our league and don't happen very often.