Josh Hart would not have walked if the Blazers were willing to pay him. You can argue it was unreasonable to pay Grant + Hart + Simons + Nurkic 95 million. I'm not arguing that, but the Blazers had a choice and they chose other (less impactful) players over Hart.
One does have to wonder what might have been if instead of trading Hart at the '23 deadline, we had somehow been able to swing a deal for Ayton at that point. Does Dame decide to stay if a Grant-Hart-Ayton front line is in place? And are we better off?
We gave him up for a draft pick, right? We gave him up for an opportunity to draft the next Giannis or Jokic. We got Kris Murray. But that's what most people get in the draft. Getting that opportunity was worth sending a great guy like that to a place he wanted to go when he had already told us we were going to lose him for nothing. I miss him. I'm glad he's happy and doing well. I'm glad we got the opportunity. I hope Kris Murray develops into something good. *Edit* Wait, we also got Thybulle. He's not Josh Hart, but I like him.
Or... Ayton, Randle, Grant, ?????, Dame Any chance we could have picked up Thybulle after already trading CJ for Randle? Would he be able to hit wide open 3s in that line-up?
1. We heard his wife wanted to be on the east coast anyway, so him staying is still a speculation - because it seems they would have had to overpay massively to do that, especially when we know that his best friend was in NY and his best friend's father runs NY and wanted him - so he would have had an NBA job no matter what in a place his wife wanted to go. 2. At the time, they were still trying to build around Dame - and I am certain they thought Grant is what Dame wanted (because, that's what he wanted) over Hart. So, let's not rewrite the decision history without acknowledging that where the Blazers were at the time is different from where they are now.
Because they are. They made the Grant over Hart decision with the idea that they want to build around Dame - and it was the right decision for that. Once Dame went away - everything else change. So, the decision to get something for Hart instead of letting him walk for nothing (given that the Blazers did not have the money to pay him and Grant) was the right one. These are separate decisions - and the one about Hart makes sense given everything we know of Hart's preferences and what the Blazers were trying to do at the time. You combining them in your mind is, frankly, a you problem.
I guess I've never seen why that had to be one-or-the-other, unless we're just assuming that Jody was absolutely unwilling to pay the tax, even for an "all-in" type team.
Exactly. I do not believe that Jody / the Vulcans were willing to go deep into the tax with that team. I have certainly used that as an axiom in that argument. Now, if we are willing to entertain that Jody / the Vulcans are willing to go deep into the tax, I would argue that no-one would even care about the Blazers because we would all be watching exotic locales from our flying cars, eating gourmet dinners produced by our food replicators while beautiful ladies, gentlemen or both pleasure us. So, yes, that was the assumption.
I'm skeptical that was the situation. My hunch is by the time of the Hart trade...in fact, well before the trade...Cronin had already decided to try and maneuver Dame into a trade demand. I think trading away Hart was signal that Dame was going to be traded, and drafting Scoot was the 2nd step of the post-Dame era offering Hart a 20M/year extension may or may not have kept him in Portland. I'm thinking probably not, but 20M/year is a lot of money re-signing Grant to a 5 year/160M deal after trading Hart and Dame didn't make a damn bit of sense to me; it still doesn't. But Grant was the end result of Cronin's first trade deadline when he dumped CJ-Powell-RoCo-Nance...and got a raft-full of criticism for those trades so my guess is he wasn't willing to let Grant walk in order to save face
Even operating under that assumption, we paid Thybulle and Murray a combine 5M less than Hart made this year. That doesn't feel like an insurmountable cost difference, especially considering that keeping Hart probably means we don't team for Scoot, meaning we pay our ?7th? pick several million less than we paid him.
1. You're assuming he would put up identical stats on a rebuilding team. 2. You're assuming we would be just as bad if we kept Hart. 3. Given that New York is ECSTATIC they have Hart, despite the stats that you apparently think are laughable, it seems that they're not an accurate measure of his worth.
Well, I find it hard to think of Cronin as both a manipulative mastermind and also an idiot that made stupid draft mistakes. I think it is Occam's razor, Cronin had to try and stay under the tax and also try to appease Dame - and that's the route he tried to navigate. Unfortunately for him, luck (Wemby) did not fall his way and Dame made enough noise before that people were not that excited to compete for the 3rd pick, so it's value was diminished. But, speculation about manipulation motives or not, Hart, I do not think, was eager to stay here anyway, so getting an asset for him was the right move.
I'd have resigned Hart for a fraction of what Grant got and ditched Grant. We got the worse player of the two on a much larger contract. Kind of impressive Cronin has assembled a 21 win team that is in the luxury tax.
Well, Hart got 66% of what Grant got, so. the fracion is 2/3 - not exactly a huge discount. Add the fact that there is no way Detroit (who traded Grant to us, reminder) was going to reverse it to send Duren our way. So, I guess, it's always nice to fantasize, but maybe that's not the right thread for it.
Blazers could have easily signed Josh Hart - they chose to have him go elsewhere. Since the Blazers acquired Hart less than a year prior - why have him be the primary player acquired in return for CJ? That makes the CJ move all the dumber if the main player we acquired is just going to leave for nothing. None of Cronin moves fit in a logical plan - although I'm fine with the Dame trade/Scoot/Sharpe picks.
Correct. Because given the cap, in order to start a restructure (which turned into a rebuild), you need to get rid of bad / unfitting bits, and whenever mistakes need to be made, it's never a pain-free process. Disagree. I think they made a lot of sense given the shit he inherited. I think the illogical bit is the people that expected it to be a quick and easy process.
