My comment was more to coaching and game-play philosophy than it was to who to draft or acquire. If you have a guy taking up that much of your payroll, with the skills he has, and you don't use them, you may as well drop the guy and build around someone else.
The Celtics built around Bird. They had game-play strategy that maximized his strengths and minimized his weaknesses. If they did otherwise, they may as well have moved him. Obviously Big Al is no Bird, but the same philosophy applies. You try to maximize that guy. If he can't respond, or won't, or you don't want to go that route, move the player.
That was the mistake with AK, imo, of course other than giving him such a big contract to begin with. They didn't build around him, they didn't play according to his strenghts and weaknesses, but they paid him as if he were the centerpiece player. Hence we were hobbled with a guy that could not and did not respond, and the coaching staff and FO did not do anything to bolster his game. So we paid full price for half a franchise player. It crashed the team in the end, by hamstringing our ability to add other pieces to the mix. I am not saying that if we had focused entirely on AK we would have had championships by now, but by half-heartedly going that route, we really did not ever see what might have been if we went whole-hog that way. We handled AK in a half-assed sort of way and that is what we got out of it in the bargain, a half-assed sort of player. And a crippling contract to boot.
Don't hire a carpenter if you are going to stop working on your deck and put in a pool, then get mad at the carpenter for not being very good at working with the pool-builders, all while paying the carpenter so much that you can't get/keep the best pool-builders you can find.
The debate here has been if Big Al is an all-nba center or not. I think that no matter what we all think of his abilities, the most telling thing for the team will be what the FO and the coaching staff decide to do with him (or not).
