oh...you mean that Portland had a really horrible and inflexible salary cap/tax situation and Olshey's hands were tied? Who the fuck was responsible for that?
Interesting.... I would be willing to bet that DJJ would disagree with you. Evan Turner also played especially horrible in Portland. And Bazemore.
So Stotts wasn't able to work his magic on him? His "good coaching" sparkle dust only works some of the time?
If anything this is an indictment of Stotts though. He could only work with one type of player. Guys he could stick in a corner and tell them to wait for the ball. Harkless, Aminu, Crabbe, GTJ..... but guys that couldn't shoot the three he had no use for. Turner, Baze, DJJ, etc. If a player doesn't fit into his plug and play puzzle, he can't figure out how to get something out of them.
Is he really out of the league because nobody wanted him? I retired immediately. It didn't even seem like he really tried to keep playing.
Almost nobody wants to trade Dame unless there's a can't-miss prospect. I mean, if it were the Luka draft would you fault Portland for dealing Dame for him? When we had the Oden pick it was widely known that Tim Duncan was on the table in trade. So yeah, even cornerstone guys can be traded in the right circumstance. (In hindsight, man, I wish we'd done that deal.) But there's no way we'd deal Dame for anything less than that kind of deal. I do agree, though, that we've already peaked in the Dame era. Time to ditch CJ, and possibly Nurk, and see what Dame can do with a new core. My ideal scenario: PG: Dame SG: Norm SF: Upgrade PF: Upgrade C: Upgrade That's not too much to ask, is it? Barring that, I'd love to find a really elite defensive 3/4 guy and build a team around hard nosed defense.
Great! Welcome aboard the Despised Truth-Teller's bus! First, you have to reconcile yourself to the loss of Dame as a Blazer... Ah. I can see you need some time to fully process this...
holy shit I'm glad I was on the side of angels that time....usually I'm not the overrating of CJ has been insane for years
Just because we've peaked with Dame doesn't mean we can't hit another peak with a different roster. The mistake with the Rasheed and Drexler examples is that they didn't execute successful overhauls of their roster around a key guy. Maybe we should've thrown a massive overhaul in around Clyde before he walked away. Maybe we should have shipped Damon Stoudamire out ASAP instead of building around him. Kobe Bryant had two peaks with the Lakers. They threw everyone else under the bus, including the most dominant offensive center ever, until they won again with Kobe. If the Lakers can lose Shaq and still win 2 more championships, then there must be a way for us to find a second life for Dame in the post-CJ era. It probably won't be a contender, but you know, it's not all about winning rings.
Yes & no. To get upgrades at 3 positions is extremely difficult. However, at the SF position -> I view RoCo as a big upgrade over Norm. If we can get a big upgrade at PF (Siakam or Wood), we'd be much better.
