As difficult as it is to assemble a roster in the best basketball league in the world that has what it takes to outperform 29 other teams in a long season of more than a hundred games, there are really only two strategies for doing so.

When Danny Ainge took over the post of chief manager of the Boston Celtics almost twenty years ago, he initially decided in favor of one and brought proven but expensive experts to the club in complicated exchanges.

Legendary: The action in which he gave up five players for Kevin Garnett in 2007.

The bill paid off.

The traditional club, spoiled by success, won the championship less than twelve months later with Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce – who went down in the folklore of the North American professional league NBA as the “Big Three”.

Since then, Ainge had persistently tinkered with the second variant, with the help of which the Celtics are now playing for the championship in the NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors.

This variant is time-consuming and no less risky.

And it takes more than patience, because it's difficult to gauge the development potential of fresh-from-college talent and use the right flair to pick them out of the aspirant pool on draft night each June.

As impressive as he was in advancing the long-term project, the 63-year-old can now only follow it from afar.

Ainge left the Celtics a year ago.

"I needed a break from Boston," he said when he took over as overall manager at the Utah Jazz a few months later, a career move that the Celtics' large community of owners didn't allow him.

Ainge is a multi-talent

His role as the architect of the team, which this spring was able to reach the final series for the first time since 2008 and even knocked out the current champions in the second play-off round with the Milwaukee Bucks, is currently rather rare Language.

His influence is already clear when you look at the biographies of the players.

Ainge drafted them all to Boston: Marcus Smart (in 2014), Jaylen Brown (2016), Jayson Tatum (2017), Robert Williams (2018), Grant Williams (2019).

The group is so strong that the Celtics could afford to hire a head coach a year ago in Ime Udoka, who had previously only worked as an assistant coach at the San Antonio Spurs, the Philadelphia 76ers and the Brooklyn Nets.

Of course, the draft strategy is not a panacea, not even when it is practiced by a multi-talent like Ainge, who came to the NBA after a stint in professional baseball and won championships with the Celtics in 1984 and 1986.

The example of Boston's final opponents this year, the Golden State Warriors, shows that the method still has its merits - the first final game will take place on Friday night (3:00 a.m. CEST on DAZN).

Their core consists of players who were drafted by the team and who over time made their mark on the NBA with their fast-paced and throwing attacking game: Stephen Curry (2009), Klay Thompson (2011), Raymond Green (2012).

The often injured center Kevon Looney (2015) has also developed, albeit with a delay, into someone who can be a success factor thanks to his rebounds.

However, the method only works as long as it is possible to bind other helpful forces around the stars.

In 2017, for example, Ainge brought Daniel Theis from Brose Bamberg to the United States on the open market.

However, as a typical inventor, he used it as part of one of his last official acts in 2021 as an object of exchange for a castling, which brought Moritz Wagner to Boston for a short time.

An experiment that yielded nothing.

Theis returned to Boston a few weeks ago.

This time in exchange for another German NBA professional: game designer Dennis Schröder.

Good for Theis, who has the chance to become the second German basketball player after Dirk Nowitzki to win a title.

However, it might be difficult.

The Celtics had to work extremely hard on their way to the Finals series, while the Warriors had a pretty easy game.

No wonder America's bookmakers have declared the San Francisco team favorites.

For Ainge, such thoughts are now of secondary importance.

Among other things, because he is satisfied with the work of his successor as chief manager, Brad Stevens.

Why not?

He had once brought him to the Celtics as a coach.