Exclusive Around The NBA: Memorable March edition

jesus. banked in a three for a win to give him 38.

no more sleeping on this guy now

 

Yeah the bank was open late tonight in Phoenix!!!

 

Maxey is the Most Improved Player. Sorry Ant

 

I don't give a fuck where our guys want to go... I really don't. We have to get at least close to equal value for them. This isn't a charity. So we get CJ where he wants to go and give the Pelicans a discount for some reason?!? If someone can explain to me how that's a good thing for us I'd be grateful.

CJ got a huge contract from us that he hasn't played up to until he's now killing it for NOLA and somehow we owe him something more than that? Nah man, this is a business and this organization has to treat it like one (while being respectful to our players) or we'll never win a fucking thing.

 

Answer is NO… we have one cheap owner. Wish he have Steve Ballmer or Mark Cuban. Jody can keep her Paul Allen’s money

 

CJ was one of our players and we were respectful to CJ by sending him to a team he wanted to go to--don't forget Dame and CJ are best friends so if we shipped off CJ to someone that made CJ mad we'd have an even bigger issue with Dame's happiness. Hell Dame probably only said okay to trading CJ in the first place if we sent CJ to a place he wanted to go to.

Unfortunately we're at the mercy of Dame and his loyalty continues to hurt the team in terms of getting value for players. We should have traded CJ a few years ago but Dame wanted to make it work with CJ. So we got pennies on the dollar for CJ by waiting so long.

 

If Dame is telling this franchise that they have to take shitty deals in order to make his friends happy then we should trade him or better yet should have told him he was fucking crazy and we'll get his friends to the best place possible that gives the team and therefore him the best chance to win. I don't think for one second you can put the kind of shitty negotiating that Cronin did in these deals on Dame. So many in here have been putting bad GM decisions on Dame for so long that you should all want him gone, according to you he is sabotaging this team. I don't believe that because I don't think Dame gave a shit where Norm, Larry and RoCo went and they were all traded away in deals that didn't come close to reflecting their value. I also don't believe that there was ever an ultimatum not to trade CJ because CJ has said in interviews that they'd felt like it could have happened in years past but this year it was for sure. Nah, Cronin made shitty deals and if they were to appease the outgoing players that's no excuse in fact it's a worse excuse than getting duped because that means that for reasons that have nothing to do with basketball or business Cronin traded away 4 of our top 7 players for one player who is better than three of them but far worse than CJ, one guy that's worse than all four but "fits the system", one prospect who has under performed during his rookie season, one first rounder with shitty conditions on it and some shitty second rounders that could have been bought with cash.

Cronin traded Norm and RoCo for Winslow, Johnson and 6M in cap relief... that's such a fucking stupid trade it's completely indefensible.

Cronin traded CJ and Larry for Hart, a fucking gamble of a first rounder and a ton of future cap relief after we'd already reset the repeater penalties and know we have to use that space on players already on the roster. There is the 20M TPE but that can only be used on a bad contract or with a ton of draft assets that Cronin didn't manage to acquire. It's important to note that the injury report says that it will only take Larry up to six weeks to recover from the surgery he had three weeks ago. Any way you want to crunch those numbers Larry could definitely be a factor in the play in and for sure they have him locked up for next season on a very nice expiring salary.

The argument that doing CJ a favor to the detriment of the franchise was a good idea is so fucked I can't even believe people are trying to say it's a good one. I will say the same thing about that I did about the trade with the Clippers, these trades are always done with competitors so there is no way that we can let those competitors end up with far more valuable assets than we're getting in return but that's exactly what we did in both trades (we did it in the trade sending Alexander-Walker out too) and that's completely inexcusable. This shit shouldn't even have to be said, everyone should be on the same page that Cronin failed at the deadline by allowing at least three teams fleece him.

 

bullshit

Dame is not the GM. The number of people trying to blame Dame for Olshey not doing his fucking job is ridiculous.

and in the case of CJ, anybody who believes it was Dame, rather than Olshey, who refused to trade him, is either loopy or didn't pay attention to how Olshey treated CJ over the last 9 years

 

Wallace went to NC. Or are you talking about high school?

 

Don’t forget Winslow.

 

Actually, it’s probably Ja.

 

he's talking NBA. Pritchard played 2 games with the Bullets in 1995-96 when Rasheed played there

he also played 62 games with Run TMC (Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin) in 1990-91. He played 11 games with Bird-McHale-Parish in 1991-92

he played 31 games in Spain in 1992-93. He actually averaged 22 points, 4 reb, 4ast, 2 stls

 

The Bullets

 

CJ owes us an apology for playing like shit and not putting in effort the past year. He finally had his pride threatened with the trade and stopped coasting.

 

With the Warriors struggles, I think they could either view Draymond as indispensable OR the current construct of the team as being too reliant on Draymond with his injury struggles. Since they're VC owned, I suspect that if they don't have playoff success they will take the latter view. I wonder if this is the year we make a strong push for him in the offseason, with the Warriors being interested in a 3-way trade for a replacement facilitator big. We know that Dame loves him and Chauncey considers him a little brother.

I'm still not sure what the Raptors are doing big-picture with all of their duplication at 3/4. However, I wonder if a 3-way deal with Siakam heading to GS, Draymond coming here, and Wiseman/picks (or Kuminga) heading to Toronto would look like.

I think we'd be a little more resilient to Draymond's consistent injury struggles because Dame and Simons are better drive and kick PGs than Steph (he's better at TONS of other stuff). Also, we'd basically be hoping that one of either Draymond or Nurk is healthy most of the time. If we could somehow make moves for Draymond and Jerami Grant in the offseason (and use MLE on someone like Mo Bomba) I think we'd have a lot of flexibility and injury insurance in our front court. Also, Jerami Grant can slide down to 3 when everyone is healthy for some minutes to make sure Nurk and Draymond get theirs.

The roster would have some challenges (shooting), but I gotta think we'd be a contender with this group.

Lillard
Simons/Hart
Little
Grant/Draymond
Nurk/Bomba



Also, our lineup of death could be something like this:

Lillard/Simons/Hart/Grant/Draymond.

 

Jesus all I'm saying is we weren't really in the best position to get the best value for our players when everyone knew we were trading these players to get below the tax. Teams took advantage of that and we got shit value back. Don't know what's so hard to understand about that lol.

 

I'm sure he talked to Dame. But, Olshey never made a single basket; and Dame never made a single call to another GM about a trade. Roster construction was Olshey's job, not Dame's

 

Yes it was Olshey's job to do roster construction and part of that is appeasing your star player. If your star player thinks so and so (CJ in this case) is the perfect match with your star player then you generally keep that so and so player. Now if we're the Lakers or something we can afford to say "Eh fuck what the star player thinks" we're going to get who we want and if that star player decides to leave so what we're LA we can get another star player to sign with us. This is Portland and if you have a star player you do all you can to keep them happy because the chances of another star player signing in Portland is extremely rare.

Now luckily Dame isn't a diva so we haven't really had to deal with that type of stuff.

 

Dame is loyal to his teammates; he's loyal to his coaches; he's loyal to the franchise; and he's loyal to the city. That's known

what should have also been known, for years, is that the Blazers did not have enough high end talent; and that Portland trotted out unbalanced rosters, year after year. And one of the biggest imbalances was the Dame/CJ backcourt. Dame may have been blind to that, but it was Olshey's job to see

Dame didn't make a max offer to Roy Hibbert; that was Olshey. Dame also didn't make a max offer to Enes Kanter; or trade for Afflalo; or make a max offer to Greg Monroe; or make a max offer to Chandler Parsons; or match Crabbe's offer sheet; or pay Evan Turner 70M; or offer Meyers 15M/year; or sign Ezeli; or sign Hezonja and Tolliver; or trade two 1st's for RoCo. All that mismanagement was Olshey. And so was refusing to trade CJ while holding him untouchable in trade talks for PG13 and Butler. Do you think Olshey asked Dame's permission for any of that? Do you really think Olshey, and his ego, would have taken a back seat to Dame's desires?