Two 8 seeds have ever got out of the 1st round. Unless your grooming young talent, which Portland is not (for the most part), I'd rather be a bottom half of the lottery team rather than hovering around .500 and getting an 8 seed. I think most front office types would agree with me.
thank you bgrant fan.... again posters are clueless if they think having 2 extra home playoff games (at worse) is something any owner would pass on. making the playoffs regardless what seed is HUGE for a franchise. that is why i cannot buy that they are rebuilding. they have no choice but to retool like the mavs have done for about 5 years. however you need a good gm and we dont have one.
making playoffs... means $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ reading the responses in this thread has made me want to leave these boards forever
Boy, this makes every single move by Larry Miller look retarded. On the day he was hired we were a player or 2 from being an honest contender for the title. Now we don't even have 2 guys worth building around, and nobody that anyone wants to trade for. He set the NBA record for quickest total devaluing of a team. Paul Allen is a moron who hires morons and until someone else owns this team don't expect him to ever get it right. Typical pampered nerd.
Not everyone can make rebuilding look as easy as KP made it look. Rebuilding a team is an ugly process. KP did it with flawless execution. I don't have faith in Cho to do it.
Two years after being named GM he had the Blazers as a 4th seed in the playoffs. That's pretty much success right there. If you want argue he didn't get the team into elite status that's one thing. You can't argue he didn't rebuild the team and turn it around. Two straight trips the playoffs sounds like successful rebuilding to me and the Blazers are certainly good enough to make it to the playoffs for a 3rd straight year. Sac/Min/etc would kill for that.
The Gasol trade was all about the cost saving. Gasol and LA's crappy picks were the icing for Heisley. It's revisionist to suggest otherwise. http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/4417/where-to-pau-gasol Al Jefferson was had for "free" by Utah because the Jazz had a huge trade exception by agreeing to sign-and-trade Boozer to the Bulls.
Don't get me wrong, I was pretty upset when KP was fired. However, he isn't infallible as some would believe. Not using RLEC was a mistake. Hedo would have been a HUGE mistake. The Claver pick was a waste. Heck, it's debatable if the draft KP is most renowned for (06) was his doing or Patterson. It also seems he rolled the dice on players with checkered injury histories and while the strategy worked for a while, now seems to be coming up snake eyes.
The Kevin Love ship has sailed. What young players out there could you realistically add to this new younger core?
Wasn't a great market for the RLEC. Best trade there was no trade imo, money carried over into offseason where the Blazers used it to sign Miller(although they wanted Hedo). Hedo was the best FA iirc so there's the RLEC for you. Who knows how it works in Portland but I'm glad he's not here and never wanted him. Claver was looked at as a future lottery pick if he came out later. KP took a risk and went with the huge upside. That's just KP's style. There was a press release after that 2006 draft where Mike Barrett reported that he heard from Paul Allen that the 2006 draft was all Kevin Pritchard. Pretty clear cut right there. And yeah, he's a risk taker. In the end in 2 years after being named GM he had this team as the 4th seed in the playoffs and the Blazers started rebuilding basically when the Kings and Wolves did. Even the Clippers. The Blazers are worlds ahead of them right now and it's because of KP.
I'm for this. I don't think we're a playoff team right now, and I think we should move guys like Miller, Camby, and Joel to add some more young talent to Batum, Matthews, and Aldridge. If Oden pans out, great, but he's not part of the longterm plans. Roy is a question mark, but also not part of the longterm plans. I would look to add either a young stud at point guard (wish we had gotten Collison) or a post scorer. I don't see any reason to keep guys like Camby or Miller on the team if we're not going to compete. I'd rather play guys like Patty, Batum, and Johnson. See if they're really what we think they are.
really? best we can do? so we are getting a young stud pg???? ahahaha. cho is gonna do this????? ahahahahahahaha
Teams that go for a complete tear down tend to be out of the picture for a long, long time, despite the popular notion that lots of lottery balls is a great situation to build from. So I hope that's not the plan. Dealing older players is reasonable assuming they get back players of at least similar value, with more of that value weighted for the future rather than the present. Trading anyone, whether they be older players, Roy or Aldridge, for pennies on the dollar just to reduce the salary structure and sink in the standings would be a terrible idea, IMO.
