Around the NBA: Maudlin May edition

yep, a utility defender for two starters , smh

 

They didn't trade for 2 starters however. Powell being a starter here was a symptom of shitty roster building by olshey.

 

No.

 

He was a pretty damn good starter for Toronto. He put up good stats here too. He was playing out of position.

 

He was primarily a starter one year in Toronto. He's a good shooter, a poor defender, and undersized at the 2.

 

WUT? so, using that logic, 2 + 2 = wool shirt

why would what the Clippers are willing to pay RoCo be his real value?

Was what Portland paid Evan Turner his real value? Let's see now, Portland paid Turner 17M in 2016 when there was a 94M salary cap. Next season, the cap will be 122M; which is 130% of the 2016 cap. So then, that would be a player like Turner getting 22M next season. Would that be his value?

since when has what one team is willing to pay a player been his real value?

FOR FUCK SAKES....the Clippers will pay 83M in luxury tax this season for a team that not only didn't make the playoffs, but also doesn't have a lottery pick. Maybe, just maybe, they make bad decisions!

 

Covington is awful player. Glad he’s gone. Winslow is much better. Clips will regret that contract.

 

Are the Clippers waving the white flag already?
I thought all the free agents want to play for big market teams.

 

One full-time defender for two part-time defenders.

 

Why would I get over it when the guy is still nothing more than the acting GM and is still in the interview process but is managing to fuck shit up.

 

They are already over the salary cap and that's why it was important for them to get a valuable player like RoCo's bird rights. Now they can still give the TPMLE to some ring chaser that wants to live in LA.

 

Maybe they value one of the most disruptive help defenders in the league who happens to be a pretty consistent three point threat that will supply the team with floor spacing off the bench. He was the only player in the league to have over 90 steals and 90 blocks this past season and he shot 45% from three for the Clippers.

The fact is that if the Clippers don't add any rotation players in free agency and are healthy next season they already have a rotation of Jackson, George, Leonard, Morris, Zubac, Powell, Covington, Kennard and Mann. That's a contender and the guys we gave them give them some serious depth.

 

so what? Do you really believe RoCo was going to re-sign in Portland? I sure don't...I think there was almost no chance at all of that. In fact, wasn't it widely believed that RoCo was the Blazer "veteran" who reportedly wasn't buying in on Billups? So, right there, it meant that the two teams were going to value him differently.

It's actually a possibility that only one team in the NBA would give RoCo a 12M/year deal, and that's the team that just did. And, to add context: the salary cap is going up 10%; but RoCo's salary is dropping 10%. Next season, RoCo will only have the 6th highest salary on the team. That doesn't look like a team rewarding talent as much as it is rewarding availability; because they won't have cap-space or a full-MLE. This isn't LAC signing RoCo because of upside; this is them taking out an expensive insurance policy because of the injury prone nature of Kawhi and PG13. Blazers don't need to buy that kind of insurance

 

I dunno how many post trade deadline posts I've liked of yours, but feels like I should be posting that stepbrothers gif at some point, lol.

https://images.app.goo.gl/PKg6xvhG2X9YGnnh9

 

Maybe, or maybe not, player attitude often changes with a new contract or a season with a few more wins. But even if Roco didn't resign in Portland, the Blazers could have included him in a sign and trade, or got better value the final day of the deadline.

We'll never know though because instead a week before the deadline we got the massive haul of Didi and Bledsoe to build a contender around Dame.

 

Two crappy "starters" on an awful team, even when Dame was playing.

 

Covington is a terrible defender. His All-Defense days are well behind him. He's sometimes a good help defender but he's not a lockdown defender. Not at all. And you hand pick a couple months with the Clippers. What did shoot from three for the Blazers over 1.5 seasons?

 

Jesus Christ, that's not a contender. A solid top 6 seed if everyone's healthy but not a team that can actually win a championship. Not at all.

 

We'll see if that's a contender. I'm pretty sure you thought we were a contender in 2018-19 and our rotation wasn't close to that good and we didn't have the amount of two way players they do. But hey, I hope they fucking suck and we are a lot better than them. I was just commenting on the fact that we gave them someone who was good enough to start for us all but 8 of the 118 games he played here, was their sixth man while Norm was down and was worth a two year $24M dollar deal to them because they don't give a shit about luxury tax and needed a solid rotational player they didn't have to use an exception on. We gave them what they needed and didn't fill a real need in return and that's not even mentioning Norm.

As far as RoCo's game goes, I'm pretty sure he's always been just a decent one on one defender and was never a lock down guy but a guy that was one of the best help defenders in the league and he continues to be. I didn't hand pick the 90 steals and 90 blocks stat... he was the only player to do that in the league over the entire season. He was also in the top five in tipped balls, as he has been year in and year out. I do not know why you can't look up your own fucking stats but he shot a very efficient 37.9% from three his first season here (70 games) and then he shot an unimpressive but not terrible 34.3% at the beginning of this season here... which if you don't remember was just an all around clusterfuck where teams didn't have to respect Dame the same way and RoCo seemed disengaged but the dude still managed to get 1.5 blocks per game with us and 1.3 steals per game and was a top 5 guy in tipped balls during that period of time as well. He's a disruptive force on defense but not a lock down defender and does knock down the three at a rate that keeps the opposition honest and floor spaced.

If you don't think we got shafted in that deal, you're kidding yourself. Just like if you don't think we got shafted in the deal sending out CJ and Larry (once the pick reverted to a 2025 Bucks pick top 4 protected not by the Bucks but by the Clippers in our deal) you're kidding yourself. Cronin has been pushed all over the place in the two major deals that he's made. A GM should be able to cut salary when trading highly productive players without giving up too much of their on court value. We gave up way too much on court value and got back way too little in return and didn't get the draft capital to even it out. I'm so sick of arguing this basic shit with some of you. The fact is, all that seemed to matter was cutting salary and for a fan of any team getting fucked in the actual talent exchange to improve the books is a slap in the face but when you're a team that has never been able to attract needle moving free agents it's a lot worse.

 

well, I sure haven't spent much time defending the Clippers trade as a good trade. It did do good things financially for Portland starting with dumping Powell's contract (which was a bad contract in Portland); it got the Blazers well under the tax line this season while trimming 68M in future salary. And it added a 6.5M TPE

so it wasn't all bad. And that trade in conjunction with the Pels trade made it much less awkward to re-sign Simons and Nurkic; and more possible (but still unlikely) to use their full-MLE this summer.

the timing of the trade certainly was questionable. But more than that, dealing with a team that didn't have a 1st round pick to trade till 2028 was questionable. But the most over-arching questionable part of the trade (in my tin-foil brain), was the relationship between Jody Allen and Ballmer. That cozy vibe makes me suspicious of the "low" cost for the Clippers

as for your points about RoCo:

* a S&T would have required Portland to keep him till the summer; but if he's not included, Blazers go deeper into the tax rather than get under the line. And I'm certain that the Blazers were not intending to re-sign RoCo for 12M/year. Besides, there is not much evidence there would have been a S&T market for RoCo. LOL...maybe the Clippers....they could have sent Winslow & Johnson!!

* as for Portland trading him at the deadline: here is the list of deadline trades:

https://www.nba.com/news/2021-22-nba-trade-tracker

I'd be curious which of those trades you believe that RoCo has value such that the Blazers could have stepped in front of one team or the other
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there is certainly a lot of disagreement about the trade deadline. A lot of it seems based upon the recurring assumption that there just had to be better trade out there because "there just had to be"; that the assets Portland sent out had much better value than the return. There is really nothing to support those positions other than the convictions it just had to be so

for me, it's much more baseline:

* I don't know exactly what instructions Cronin was given by the Vulcans. But I'm guessing it was "dismantle Olshey's mess as much as you can". The way the Vulcans handled Olshey's firing sure seems to indicate they were done with Olshey and his overpriced rosters and over-paid players.

* the idea that the Blazers could have an elegant pivot point from a pretender to a contender by trading pretending assets for contending assets is simply unrealistic. The roster at the beginning of February was a dead-end roster. Portland had been in that dead-end for years. And there was no cul-de-sac at the end of the dead-end, it was a brick wall. There was no room to turn around. Blazers had to back out of that dead-end and that will take time. Hopefully not as long as it took to get to that brick wall.

* that dead-end roster was a tax team and was obviously going nowhere. The players traded were being paid half of the payroll. They offered no upside to Portland, only downside. Where is the lost value? I just don't see it. This isn't an addition-by-subtraction argument. It's an argument that sometimes the only path is subtraction. And that was the reality of that brick wall