Olshey?

Fire him today. And Stotts with him.

They're both so blah. No fire at all.

He has dis-assembled our team to a great guard duo who have to play 2 on 5
every game.

Nurkic is not going to be the non-injury prone center we need to be competitive.

Vonleh, Aminu, Leonard, Harkless might fulfill their potential but not under Stotts.

Ready for someone who knows how to build a team.

 

It's not the concept that made one trade bad and one trade good, it's the result. It's like saying, "What made the Lillard draft pick good and the Leonard draft pick bad? NO used a draft pick to select a prospect in both cases. Same exact thing." Sure, same concept, terrible choice. When you target the wrong player with a draft pick, it's a bad draft pick. When you target the wrong player in trade, it's a bad trade.

 

Which is why I didn't bring up the afflalo trade as that one could be considered bad.
Even though Portland was never going to resign the free agents they traded away.

With Portland losing Aldridge, Rolo, & Matthews. They were never going to offer Batum the super-max deal he got.
Therefore he would have walked for nothing. Instead NO turned that into a 19year old pf with potential.
Which is the exact same trade he made with Plumlee.
There is literally no difference considering Nurk's injury history. It could turn out to frankly be a worse trade than the Vonleh trade.
To say it's a great trade and the Batum trade was bad is completely short-sighted.

 

Even if you think you had to trade Batum (which they didn't), a better trade would have gotten a superior return than what they seem to have gotten--a player who looks like a career deep reserve.

What you get matters, not just the idea behind the trade. I agree that the idea behind the trade wasn't awful--just what Olshey actually traded for. At this point, it appears he got zero value in return. If Nurkic also ends up providing almost no value (though he's already provided more value than Vonleh has), we can mark that down as a bad trade too.

 

I doubt Batum had much value coming off that season as he basically posted career low's in every category his last year in Portland.(if you don't include his rookie year).
People forget how shit he was that season. Sure he rebounded to his career averages the year after. But there is no guarantee Portland would have got anywhere close to value for Batum before the break due to that it was a contract year.
History has shown offers go down when a player with be an UFA in the off-season. Batum doesn't get you a pick in the top 10 in an upcoming draft. Instead he got you the #9 pick in the previous draft.(who was 19 years old)
Ignoring these things is another way for people to not look at the whole picture and say. "OMFG BAD TRADE YOU SUCK BAD I DO BETTER ON 2K".
When in fact 2k is a video game, not real life.

Could Portland have resigned Batum, then traded him when he was under a supermax? possible.
But it's the same possibility Portland has of trading players who you don't think can be moved currently on Portland's roster.

At the end of the day, both Nurk & the Vonleh trades are the same deal. One produced at a far higher level over a small sample size, while the other has improved gradually over his time(160+games) in Portland.
But they're the same trade, both good trades.

 

They really aren't, but we're essentially going in circles here. I think Batum had more value than Plumlee (career value matters too, not just the single most recent season) at the time of the trade and I think Nurkic is a far better player than Vonleh. Whether or not the idea behind them was the same, the value gain/loss was massively different (in my opinion) which makes one trade good and one trade bad.

I really don't care whether the trades were made for the same reason--I care about the value gained and lost in each. You don't agree that Batum had more value than Plumlee, nor do you apparently agree that Nurkic is better than Vonleh. That's fine--this is a fairly subjective debate, there isn't a good way to "prove" the intrinsic value of all the players involved in these two trades.