You guys are really getting creative. The reports are that Dame was leaning trade but Joe convinced him to wait. Dame had a call with Chauncey on Friday after we did Jack shit and decided to ask out. There were reports from Dames camp after the Monday meeting saying that he wanted to give the team time to do their thing in free agency. There was no indication that dame asked for a trade. There was a lot of smoke that he was leaning that way though.
And your wife slapped you and said, "snap out of it you idiot! It's just fucking basketball. You want wrong? Let me show you the fucking news!" Right?
I think Miami strategically signed Jaime hoping Joe would be impatient and not have to include him in a potential deal. Yeah, Fuck Pat Riley… Fuck the Heat…
You've got to do you. I do not like the way this team is being run. I think they put Dame in an awful position, in fact I think they put him in so many awful positions that it broke his loyalty that he very much was sincere about. So I will continue to be a huge Dame fan. Personally regardless of bad ownership, management, coaching or even players I've never been able to not be a huge Blazers fan. I'm waiting for this trade to go through so I can move on from this ugliness and start being excited about whoever it is we have on the roster with Scoot and Shaedon who I'm already really excited to watch play in Blazers uniforms even though that excitement is being clouded by the bullshit we're watching play out. To me if Dame is handling this in a way that I think is unfair by only giving the team one option when that option doesn't have enough to offer the team and still be the place where Dame wants to play, Dame is doing so because he feels like his loyalty was met with extreme disloyalty. It is important to note that the only person that has reported that it's Miami or bust is Sam Amick and everyone else is citing his report in theirs. So while I'm not saying it's false it could be just like when Dame was reported to have demanded a trade a few years ago and hadn't. I do think the trade demand has been confirmed by plenty of sources for us to see that as a fact.
Hey man, you do you. It's your fandom, and you don't need approval from anyone here if you want to follow Dame to his next destination (I am assuming that's why you indicated Miami)... come back (or not) when the time is right -- this forum will keep chugging along. Or are you simply making point and asking internet forum posters to talk you out of it for dramatic effect? If so, yikes.
Yeah, it's been stressing me out to and that's exactly the opposite reason that I'm a sports fan this is supposed to be fun and relatively inconsequential. It's really easy for me to be pissed about a tough loss in a game, even in the playoffs when it ends our season and be fine about it a half hour later. Sports are fun to get wrapped up in in the moment and then forget about. This is hitting differently. Sorry that what's supposed to be fun is messing you up but you're not alone in that.
As long as the team is part of PA’s estate and managed by Jody & Bert, there will never be a decentralized approach that benefits a team in a smaller market. Dame realizes this now in a big way. When a guy like Joe thats been true Vulcan for years, remains the conduit to their centralized approach one of the big time negatives, is a lack of urgency. Slow to move.
dame asking out and leaving is not that big of a deal in a vacuum. like every star player asks out eventually, and he gave us 11 yrs. but just the way this happened and why he was motivated to leave after so steadfastly preaching loyalty is what has me so messed up. dude was in the PF in his Blazer gear every day this offseason until two weeks ago. he was in Paris rocking a Blazer tank right before the draft. this is a guy who embodied everything a franchise player is supposed to. and we couldn't put one viable roster around him? 5 yrs from now when scoot/shaedon/whoever come into their own, will our FO/ownership be ready to put what it takes around them to actually compete for anything worthwhile? we haven't been past the conf finals in 30 yrs. this isn't by accident. i'm going to get super hyped about shae/scoot and watch every one of their games, buy merch, and support them as if they're family.... all for what? for them to eventually get frustrated and leave to win elsewhere? when will we be the franchise that stars flock to? sorry, i know i'm in my feels. been a rough 24 hrs even if i predicted this inevitability.
I know how you feel man. I felt the same way when Drexler forced his way out (after having his assed kissed up one side and down the other for years by PA). Seeing him win a ring (while we got pennies on the dollar) and then go to the HOF in a Rockets jersey put me off that asshole permanently. The way Lillard has gone about this whole clusterfuck has been very hard to swallow and has definitely affected how I'll probably view him in the long run (like Dame actually gives a shit how I...or you....or any other Portland fan....feels at the moment). And that just pisses me off more. A contract with close to a a quarter of a billion dollars left on it tends to blunt even a frisson of sympathy for the guy........we should all have his choices......
good post. there's a hell of a lot of bile directed at Dame based upon one tweet, from Amick I believe that said, essentially, that Dame would only play for one team, Miami. Seems a lot of people believe that's what Dame said. But that sure does not match what Dame has been for 11 years in Portland. It would be a stupid stance, and it would be unprincipled. I would say I'm surprised that some people believe that tweet and are running with it, but I'm not to me, if Dame just wanted to find out what was going on he wouldn't have went into Monday's meeting with his agent. In light of what happened since, I find the most credible chain of events to be what has been reported and that's that Dame asked for a trade Monday, or at minimum told Cronin he was leaning that way, Cronin asked him to wait for a few days, presumably to see if something would happen at the last minute, and nothing did; so Dame formally asked for a trade. People going all ballistic about the timing of Dame's announcement appear to just want to go ballistic about anything Dame related as for Grant's new deal, the more I have thought about it, the more it looks like an agreement that has been in place for months. Probably even before the team asked him to sit out for the tank. Maybe all the way back to when he arrived in Portland last summer. Grant wanted that 5th season and I think the Blazers agreed to give him that season months ago. My guess is that this was all independent of Dame's decisions. It was between Grant and the Blazers. In fact, just glancing at the numbers, it looks like Grant's base salary might be exactly 20% of the salary cap. If so, that's not a coincidence
I’m curious if you would have traded Scoot or Shaedon for Pascal. It’s akin to when the Kings traded Haliburton for Sabonis. Haliburton is going to be the better and younger player, but that trade balanced the Sacramento roster and turned them from a bottom feeder into a top 3 seed.
Pat Riley is similar to Ric Flair. He exudes an aura of flamboyance. Just as Flair boasted about being the "Nature Boy" and his lavish outfits, and sleeping with thousands of women, Riley, with his slicked-back grease-monkey hair and sharp suits, exudes a captivating presence that demands attention. Both Flair and Riley share an undeniable charisma that draws people in, making them larger-than-life figures in their respective arenas. It's worth noting that Ric Flair, known as the "Dirtiest Player in the Game," often employed underhanded tactics to secure victories inside the wrestling ring. His flamboyant character embraced a level of dishonesty and rule-breaking that defined his wrestling persona. Pat is cut from the same cloth. He's a relentless turd.
i have been proposing 3 + Ant for Pascal + pick deals for a while, no? regardless, i was more upset about our inactivity with 23, Ant, or those 5 seconds, or the flexibility that we were promised to be used for better positional fits. we did.... nothing. we simply picked BPA with our picks in consecutive drafts. we gave up a veteran in Hart who actually was useful on the floor for another pick. we wasted our MLE on a guy who didn't want to be here. there's plenty to blame Joe for outside of any potential trades with 3.
