Zombie Damian Lillard to request trade in coming days (nope, he's not.)

How can you report truehoop without talking to the Real Source?

 

Henry is getting close to seeing eye-to-eye with a man who's jock strap he could not hold. Sounds fair.

 

That guy has always come across like he knows better than anyone else. You talk about arrogance HeAb is so.

 

I call them guys weasels!

 

Weasels ripped my flesh.

(That is of course a metaphor.)

 

Wow, Dame must be the nicest guy on the planet to give this guy that interview (unless Abbott is committing complete career suicide and Dame comes out and says they never spoke). Why wouldn't Dame give the interview to someone else? Just roast the guy with someone who has been fair to him? The only thing I can come up with is that he had compassion for the guy and is helping him save his career. I guess it seems that Dame's agent also has a relationship with Abbott but it was still really fucking nice of Dame.

 

I don't understand this analogy. Is he saying someone saw Dame not being fully committed to the Blazers and took it as a sign that Dame would ask out soon, and then Henry took it as a fact and ran a story on it? I even listened to the podcast part of it where they talk about it and I still don't get it. He seems to suggest Dame is just using this as leverage to get the team to really upgrade it's roster (he also hinted that the Blazers may not be fully committed to winning). Either way, this is a FAR CRY from what he was actually reporting.

 

I still don't get it. Can someone make sense of it to me?

https://www.truehoop.com/p/bring-it-in-the-moment-theyve-been

First 15 minutes of the pod.

He's suggesting:

• Dame either knows, or was communicated to him, that the only way he would ever be able to leave Portland (because he's on his supermax contract), is if he threatens to sit out.
• Dame HIMSELF, has never threatened to sit out, but perhaps a Dame adjacent (agent, maybe?) has made it clear to Portland's FO that it is a possibility if they don't do what he asks.
• The Blazers may not be fully committed to winning, from the GM to the owner. This was something I had thought was a possibility based on Dame's comments since our season ended.
• This is Dame's way of holding leverage over the organization if they truly are not committed to winning.
• May be bad for the team short term if Dame gets moved, but good for the team in the long term if it ousts a bad owner and a bad front office. (This I can agree with at least)

TL;DR - Nothing we didn't already know. This is a power play by Dame. He feels the team isn't committed. The burden is on the team to prove they are. But as far as Henry's "reporting" goes, it seems like a lot of horse-shit. You can gleam this information from all of Dame's PUBLIC interviews since end of May.

 

The only thing he addressed was when Abbott tripled down and said Dame was willing to give up game checks. He did not address the fact that the initial report that Dame was demanding a trade in the next few days was patently false. As you know, he went into some dumbass analogy about not paying for a beer when you have a friend with a sword (I'm not making this up). He implied that by Dame saying that he wasn't 100% committed to being here that Dame had to be saying he would sit out games.

That means that Abbott is an idiot and doesn't get Dame for even a second. Dame thinks that if he requests a trade, that the team will in a reasonably timely manor grant him that trade. Dame is smarter than James Harden... he wouldn't have to sit out or play like shit on purpose if Neil tried to play hardball. Dame could just call a press conference and state the facts that he has given everything to this franchise and the franchise just isn't trying to win with him, so he wants out. I don't think it would come to that because I think if Dame requested a trade the team would honor that request because Dame has garnered so much goodwill with the team and the entire basketball world that it would be devastating to the Blazers reputation to not capitulate to Dame's request.

 

I think the thing he was implying was that, if the Blazers didn't feel that threat (sit out), they wouldn't have any reason to act. But the way Abbott framed it was as if Dame actually communicated it to management, even though he did not. Abbott is suggesting that Dame (in some roundabout way), wanted the Blazers to feel that threat, but he (Abbott) was just wrong in his interpretation.

Dame just wants the team to be better. He's said that in public multiple times. I don't know how you can interpret his actions any other way. Abbott trying to frame what Dame actually wants to do based on his "sources" is just un-truthful reporting. It's just straight bullshit.

 

I don't agree with Abbott's interpretation but if you follow his flawed logic he wasn't reporting untruthful straight bullshit. He says he has sources and he doesn't even need sources because Dame said that he's not 100% committed to being here. Again for Abbott to extrapolate that means Dame is threatening to sit out is stupid and you might think he is just spinning it that way to cover up for the fact that he lied. If he's not spinning it and he really believes that any trade request with the expectation of getting the request granted implies a player's willingness to sit out, then he wasn't lying. The guy just has no imagination because there are a lot of ways without sitting out that players can leverage their position to get traded (interviews being the easiest, telling the team that they're ruining their reputation with any star player is another).

 

Every "journalist" is trying to be the next woj or shams. Just stop. Henry fucking abbot knows nothing more than you or me. Just click bait and calls from "sources".

 

The funniest thing is that at the beginning of the pod (and all over Twitter yesterday), he's boasting about how "True"hoop reports nothing but the truth. Hell, it's in the name of the site! But he basically contradicts himself later when he suggests that he's only reporting implied truths about the Dame situation. It's literally speculation that he's passing around as truth.

 

I fucking love this. Dude said what he had to say before he headed to Japan and now he'll keep saying what he has to in house and no comment everyone else while playing his best until the team does what he wants (if they haven't already) or he gets traded.

 

...wonder if the "or some" would include the infamous rumor that Dame drinks like a fish?! Maybe we can make enough noise to get him to address S2 directly

 

booger sugar