Time to start over, I know PA won't want to hear it but its time to nuke this roster and start from scratch. You simply CANNOT win in Portland Oregon, through Free Agency and trades. We need to gut this team for cap space and future draft picks. Get a few lottery picks and hope to hit a home run with a new franchise player. Aldridge, Batum, Wallace, Matthews...every last one of them. Those guys are not good enough to get us where we want to go, and being stuck in mediocrity is the worst place you can be. I hope Larry Miller has the stones to get this done. -hank
Maybe we can follow the Cavs plan. Suck for 19 years until you strike gold in draft then have superstar leave Portland for bigger market. Suck again and repeat.
I find OP funny, if we can't improve by free agency or trades what the hell good is any cap space going to be?
Flexibility, get under the cap, aquire draft picks..hope to get a superstar and then use the cap space to complete the team with veteran FA's. It's either blow it up or spend the next 5 years hoping to be a 6-8 seed and getting bounced in the first round.
And how would that be better than maintaining a core of Aldridge, Wallace, Batum, and Felton while positioning the team to have enough cap space to sign a max FA next summer, bringing Joel Freeland over, and having a mid-range draft pick in a really deep draft?
Because premier NBA FA's will not sign in Portland..the core that you mentioned of Aldridge, Wallace, Batum and Felton are not good enough to get us a legit shot at winning a title..and yet they are good enough to consistently win 40ish games a year and keep us drafting in the late teens to mid 20's every year. It's time to start over, the Roy era has ended and we need to nuke it.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. Sure the premier stars will do what they've always done and position themselves to play in big markets, but there's a whole lot of very good players who will be looking for a big contract and not enough teams are going to have the cap space to give it to them. Besides, how is the recipe of blowing it up in order to take a chance on the draft a recipe for success? If the guy you draft is a premier player, he may eventually try to play the "trade me or I won't re-sign" game. I'd rather start with some really good pieces than start with nothing.
No, it's either blow it up or else keep together a core that is good but not great and hope to add pieces through smart signings, drafts and trades to improve their lot. Which is the way most teams go from good to great. And if your problem with the second scenario is lack of trust in the front office to make smart decisions then I fail to see why you'd trust them with cap space and lottery picks.
But I do agree that they need to do something big. LaMarcus Aldridge and 14 complementary players wont get you too far.
How many teams built a champion through purposefully tearing their team down ("tanking") and then using the cap space and lottery picks? Provide a few examples that show that this blueprint is quite a successful one.
We've been under the cap before with plenty of $$ to offer to big time FA's... why don't we have Lebron or CP3 playing here? Shoot, we could not even convince Hedo to come to Portland. It simply won't happen. The only way for this team to re-build is through the draft. I don't want to see another decade of trying to "re-load" by bringing in aging overpaid ex-stars like Wallace in desperate trades. It won't work.
