The Blazers had too little talent to contend 9 months ago. They need more talent, it's would've been difficult to add but still a possibility. Cronin sent out 4 starters for Hart and Didi. That's a huge downgrade of talent. Now there is no possible move to get this roster to contend. I don't need to see what Cronin does in 3 months to know contending isn't possible, and that his statement of winning with Dame soon are unrealistic. Some fans understand this. Others will have to wait until we see the team fall short next season. That's fine. I've written off any expectations of this team being relevant in the years ahead. I'm mad Jody and Vulcan and Cronin have put the team in this position. It's sad, but this franchise was in much better hands a year ago with shitty Olshey running it. Welcome to the first of many disappointing seasons of following the Blazers.
Cronin gave up assets to get cap room, but cap room has almost no value in Portland and no good free agent this year. He gave up assets a week before the deadline without hearing other teams offers. He gave up assets because he thinks it helped him negotiate with other GMs. All clear evidence he is a poor negotiator and should not be a GM.
Teams get a couple million of salary relief all the time to get out of the tax without giving up 1 starter let alone 4.
At this point Hart is a far superior player to Ingles, and he isn't close to a needle mover. I can't understand why anyone would point to Ingles as proof Cronin is doing a good job.
OK, this isn't aimed at you personally, but I hate this argument. The implication is that our GM should be held to the same standard as the average fan.
IF we win the lottery…and for this hypothetical Det takes a TPE and future first for Grant does the following roster even get HC in the playoffs? Dame/BWill Ant/Hart/Keon Nas/Ingles/Winslow Grant/Jabari/Watford Nurk/GB3
If we win it I think it might be best to trade Dame. Build it around Ant/Jabari. That 2025 pick would help that timeline a hella of a lot better.
Giving up talent for less talent sure is big picture thinking. Now we have less tradeable assets to put together to actually trade for stars. We will be back here next year and you will continue to say just wait. Rinse and repeat.
Nobody is saying we could have traded CJ for a star. We wanted the CJ and Dame backcourt to be broken up as much as anyone else. Cronin should have at least worked the Lakers pick into the pick that could have conveyed to us. Instead of a shit asset of the Bucks 2025 1st that is 3 years from now. That will do a lot of good for us with Dame being 35 paying him 55+ million being a treadmill team if we still kept him. Get a real GM in here to handle this offseason. I would take Danny Ainge in a heartbeat over Cronin right now.
There is no way to realitically make a contending roster with these assets , at least on paper. Cannot rule out the team plays incredibly well as constructed: Dame Ant Nas Nurk and probably Winslow. That is probably your 5 starters unless Cronin trades the pick for Grant, a horrible idea IMHO.
Cronin’s leverage was taken away when the ORGANIZATION decided to take care of CJ and let him have input and pick the team he wanted to go to. I’m pretty sure this was a decision that came from above Cronin.
If the organization is doing that, it makes the "wait until the offseason is over" crowd look foolish. Nothing will change on that front. And if ownership stays, we certainly need someone as GM that would argue/persuade the owners. I don't buy all this though. Cronin, even with marching orders from the owners. Could have tried to include the Lakers pick as the first backup to the Pelicans pick. Why in the world would New Orleans have said no at the time? The Lakers were looking like they were going to make the playoffs and if something happened where the pelicans leapfrogged them for some reason, it would have given us the pick.
no, he did not. This was never about cap-space. It was about being able to re-sign Simons and Nurkic without having a 90M tax bill next year. AND, it was about dismantling the idiotic dead-end-of-purgatory roster that olshey assembled I'm not a Cronin fan and in fact prefer if he was not the GM approaching the draft. But to pine for Olshey is fucking nuts
Joe speaks about cap room: After Trade deadline Quick: Joe, you talked about the different options: cap room, trade exception. Have you done any intel on that? Because cap room generally hasn't been a good way for Portland to go. So are you confident that with the trade exception, you have options? Cronin: Yes. And cap room isn't just in free agency for free agent signings. You can also use it for trades as well. So really the cap room for us is a way to have the optionality in order to go above the $21 million trade exception. So we have the trade exception that you can either trade and acquire with, or you can sign-and-trade free agents into the cap room. It just gives us another vehicle to increase on that $21 million, so if we need to get to a $30 million number, we can back out further with the cap, even in the trade. So that's one thought. And then as far as free agency goes, we're confident that we can go out and be competitive in our recruiting. I think with Chauncey Billups, me and Lillard, I think that we will get in meetings and we will paint a very good picture of this organization and this city. And we're not going to run from players that we think make sense here.
If we land top 3 pick we could potentially trade for say someone like Collins from Atlanta, Butler from Miami or another star who’s team got outed in playoffs. Not to say we will but that at least opens up a lot of possibilities.