Honestly, I'd rather just do CJ/Butler. You leave Aminu (blech!) as our only PF and Butler as our only SF. That's thin as fuck, and we're already quite thin.
What would be ideal is getting Gibson as well, but Thibs would probably combust if you separated him from his two longstanding vets.
Btw, this was almost verbatim a quote by Neil. It shows you a real fundamental problem. It’s not about having the best backcourt. Who gives a fuck? There are three other guys on the court. Nurkic is more important to this team than CJ, yet I never hear Olshey hype him up, and you got Terry criticizing him even when he plays well. Never heard either one say anything critical about lord McCollum, even though he’s cost us more games than Nurk has. Without Nurk we’d be in the lottery. Without CJ we might actually be better, or at least a lot less stagnant. Sick of it.
I agreed with you up to this point. I'm hoping you mean that "replacing CJ with someone who better balances the roster might actually make us better", rather than implying addition by subtraction. Simply deleting CJ makes us a whole hell of a lot worse.
I don’t know what I meant. There’s a part of me that thinks addition by subtraction, but then there’s a part of me that doesn’t. I’d like to see how this team would play without him. I know the ball would move a lot more. CJ is a great scorer but when he’s off, he doesn’t really have a positive affect on the game.
Sometimes when you loose a player like Cj you get better. Kind like Utah lost Hayward to Boston did that make Utah worse no actually they might been better team. When you have ball dominate player like Cj that don't mean you can't be better when you loose him. It just means your offensive changes where more players get involved in the offensive. Even your whole entire team gets better due more players are involved.
I hate to go all broken record on the board, but please Neil, once you've low-balled and hedged upward in your offers, final offer them CJ and their pick of Turner or Aminu, for Butler and anything. If they still don't want to do it, at least you tried.
Don’t worry once Butler gets traded to another western conference team we’ll get a Woj tweet “confirming” Portland made an effort. Clockwork.
Bah. I have to respectfully disagree. I think Olshey would trade any player if it made the team better. Of course, I've never met the guy or asked him directly, so I'm just going on the premise that he's a rational human
I think I'm okay with trading CJ because I have a gut feeling that Simons could be better than CJ ever was. Fight me!
Nope. Not gonna fight you. My golden gut tells me Simons is going to be special. Not this year, but before the end of his rookie contract.
I understand the concept. It's why I was one of the few who understood that losing LA wasn't going to hurt our team. But when you remove your 4th* most effective scorer you're now in the position of needing less effective players to suddenly become more effective - that generally doesn't work out too well. *I'm using rotation players, not include GP, WB4, Meyers, or Pat. Even then, it's disingenuous to think that just because Ed has a higher eFG% we'd be better with him taking CJ's shots. Personally, I'd say CJ was our 2nd best scorer because nobody above him, aside from Dame, could create their own shot. Deleting that ability/efficiency is a lot harder than replacing - literally - your least effective player who takes twice as many shots as the next guy.
