We really have entered crazyville cause some of you fans are praising Cronin and making Dame the bad guy -- WTF is wrong with you people besides the obvious. You have zero loyalty to the player who is the only reason the Blazers are not in the lotto each and every season since he has been in the league. You show ZERO loyalty to the player that has given his heart and soul not only to the franchise but to the city of Portland but NO he is a bad guy. It's Cronin that should be fired and run the hell out of town along with that BEEP Jody who is making Cronin her YES man but no let's praise Cronin for contributing to this cluster BEEP this has turned into.
It's the Flavor of the day. And the love for it get's shorter and shorter by the minute. People now think 5 years is an eternity. They can't comprehend that 19 + 5 is 24. Because 24 will be too old to build around i guess.
19 years old today, is 24 in 2028. There are teams that have already sent picks for 2030 away. But i guess this franchise , with a 32 year old, generational talent in his prime , doesn't rate that kind of commitment. If he does, please show me. And again, Every Great Player Gets Paid. Real loyalty is surrounding said player with talent that can pay dividends for that player's timeline. Especially when it's said to be the plan.
I'm positive it was discussed, but I never saw a reason why we had to get DET and all the picks involved...why couldn't/didn't Cronin just take Wiseman for GP2?
Yeah I'm very happy how the Blazers now have Scoot and Sharpe. If Cronin's main skill is tanking for top lottery picks it's going to be very hard to ever transition to build a winner. Tanking is really only something you can do a few seasons. There becomes a real risk of players and the organization getting stuck with long term loser habits. Even to have these last two picks we also had multiple lucky breaks outside of Cronin control to allow us the chance of drafting Scoot/Sharpe.
I'm not sure what your proposing, that the Blazers should give away a 2028 pick only to make Dame happy even if the team has no possibility of contending? I'm fine with trading away future if we're getting legit above average starting player in return. None of the names or rumors are giving us that. If the Blazers don't have that option they should continue with the path of building for the future. There is no reason to throw away a 2028 pick if it provides no winning benefit today. It sucks this team hasn't given Dame better rosters. But that was mistakes over a long time of a decade, it just can't be fixed in an instant. It's a sunk cost now. Doing another mistake today won't undo the prior ones.
I actually thought this was a joke thread. And even though it's not, it is. "[P]laying chess with Dame"? How? By saying one thing and doing another? By jerking around (arguably) the best player in Trail Blazer history? I like the picks, but it seems pretty apparent, especially from pretty much every roster move outside of the draft and I guess acquiring Jerami, that Cronin is in way over his head. But who knows. Maybe/hopefully come training camp we'll all be singing his praises.
Cronin is doing what I hadn't dared hope he would do (take huge swings in the draft and not trade assets for mediocre vets when everyone in the world is yelling at him just to make Dame happy). So good for him. I didn't much like the Grant acquisition, but it was basically the bare minimum to keep Dame happy.
Yeah he seems to be making sound decisions in the draft. I was listening to Aaron Fentress on Chad/Dwight and he's just echoing everything else we have heard. That teams were trying to fleece us. I don't think anyone wants to help Joe out. They think they have him over a barrel because of Dame and they're trying to dunk on him. I don't think the LAC trade helped his cause. I think GMs look at that deal and they think Joe is a rube.
If that's what he is up against then he just needs to trade Dame for the best haul possible... I think there would be too much interest in Dame for them to "have him over a barrel". I don't actually think that is his only option and hope he finds one that is good and keeps Dame but if having Dame is stacking all of the odds against Cronin being able to help this team get better then he has to do the prudent thing and move Dame. I'll fucking hate it but I'll hate it more if we roll into next season with what we had last season plus another short guard who is best when dominating the ball and someone we can get for the TPMLE... or even the MLE.
reportedly, the Clippers are out there trying to dump Powell and Morris for cap savings. I think the 2nd apron is going to really squeeze marginal players on larger, long term contracts, like Powell (or Ant), and ratchet down their value. I also don't think that Clippers trade impacted perception of Cronin. Every GM of a team not willing to go 50M over the tax line knows what it is to have an owner insisting on cost control; and at the time of the trade, Portland was a tax team with a record 11 games under .500. Pulling the plug was the prudent course of action we also heard that just about every team in the top-10 of the draft was looking at trades. None happened. I've said it before, but right now, I think draft picks, even high ones, are at their lowest value ever. Maybe the new CBA will start to shift that value the other direction, but if a team wasn't already in rebuilding mode, there didn't seem to be much appetite for leveraging good players in order to move into the draft. Sounds like the Pelicans were wanting the 3rd pick for a bundle of their future picks. The Zion stuff is difficult to credit all I heard was that teams made shitty offers for the 3rd pick. And Portland quickly refused. I never heard a single report/rumor that any team, after Portland's refusal, came back with a better offer. If teams would have truly wanted that 3rd pick they would have. Meaning, it very well could have been teams were only interested in fleecing the Blazers, not in the 3rd pick look at the two teams in the finals and the years of experience: Jokic 8 KCP 10 Gordon 9 Murray 6 Porter 4 Brown 5 Green 15 Braun 1 (22 years old) Adebayo 6 Butler 12 Vincent 4 (27 years old) Lowry 17 Strus 4 (27 years old) Caleb Martin 4 (27 years old) Love 15 Robinson 5 (29 years old) Oladipo 10 pretty much the same look for the Lakers and Celtics too when you look at conference finals. Austin Reaves was a rookie, but he was a 24 year old rookie teams will take 19 year old rookies if they have a pick and he's BPA. But they don't seem to go out of their way to trade for a 19 year old rookie unless he's a can't miss prospect. Dame had good reasons for saying he wasn't interested in more 19 year old rookies. He knows where he was at at 19; and he know where he was at at 22 as a rookie
