Doc Rivers would have waited on Kendrick Perkins trade

Danny Ainge is out there selling it — he still stands behind the Kendrick Perkins trade. He has no choice, that was his baby.

Doc Rivers, he would have waiting a while.

That’s what Rivers told the Boston Globe.

“Well, I would wait until after the year is over. I’ll put it that way. I do think Jeff Green has a chance to be a starter for us in the future and a hell of a basketball player. And Krstic can help. But making that trade at the time we made that trade, that made it very tough for us. And not only that, we added other pieces as well that we tried to fit in.

“It was just a lot of moving parts to a team that the advantage that we had was that we had continuity, everybody else was new. Chicago was new and the Heat were new. They couldn’t fall back on what we could fall back on with our starting five. Once we made that trade, we took that advantage away.”

Rivers explained what he meant by continuity.

“…But it was more that you have new guys playing different positions and you had a guy who could literally reach back into a playbook and throw out something that was three or four years old and they all knew it, when Perk was there. When you lose Perk, you take that one guy out of that starting lineup, now there’s the fifth guy who doesn’t know your offense three years ago; he only knows what he knows since he’s been there. And that limited our group. With Rondo, because the way teams guard him, you need a massive playbook. That took more away from it than we thought.”

I’ll agree with Ainge in that I’m not convinced keeping Perkins puts Boston past Miami, because the problems Miami created Perkins did not solve.

But the trade did hurt this team, make no mistake. And to make that kind of move when your team is in contention for a title, to weaken it, was a big mistake.