We’ve seen recession/austerity hit a CBA negotiation and yeah it’s not fun… but at the same time I don’t think the NBA is any more overvalued thank any other sport.
They had terrible players to be bad enough to get that high in the draft. Putting in hard work in the off season is a given if you want to win big. But you have to have enough talent first. Best way to get that is high in the draft. Next best way is to be smarter than everyone else and draft better.
To me our best building blocks have not been through the draft but through trades. Deni, Toumani, Thybulle, Banton, Ayton, Williams...Grant signed as a free agent but had been part of the CJ trade capital first deal. from the draft Clingan was a steal, Scoot was a good pick and Sharpe as well..our first round pick on this team is Ayton ..thank you Phoenix!
Thats right. Whats crazy is before that, one year they lost to the Blazers in the first round. Not sure how that could have happened but, i just read it.
Can you imagine the night-to-night competitiveness of a league with that kind of parity, where only one team won fewer than 30 games, and only one won more than 50?
Yeah, even the teams that have been notorious for tanking really never took the next step tell they made big time trades. Players are so young and unproven when they jump to NBA.
Over the years Id say Wolves, Clippers & Sixers were notorious tankers and since 90 how many ships have they won? They each got better through trades the years they finished over 500.
it was pretty intense and the one team that won more than 50 games got swept in the WCF by....Portland
Article on ESPN+ They have Portland at 10th in the rebuild process and saying the exact thing some of us have been screaming about Players on rookie-scale contracts: 5 (Scoot Henderson, Donovan Clingan, Shaedon Sharpe, Kris Murray, Jabari Walker) The strategy: Since moving on from Damian Lillard 18 months ago, it has been difficult to discern the overall strategy for Portland, especially after a 21-61 season to kick off the post-Lillard era. The Blazers got a haul of draft picks and players back in the Lillard and Jrue Holidaydeals and they added promising young forward Toumani Camara from the Phoenix Suns as part of the price of getting Deandre Ayton out of Phoenix. But trading a lottery pick and another future pick last offseason for Deni Avdija, who has played well in Portland, was a win-now move -- not a rebuilding one. Still having the likes of Ayton, Jerami Grant, Robert Williams III and Anfernee Simons on the roster is also hard to square with where this team is sitting, as is the fact the Blazers have little cap flexibility for at least another season. Is it working? Portland winning a bunch of games over the past few weeks could be taken as a sign of things moving in the right direction. But by doing so, Portland has moved out of the top 10 spots in the draft lottery, likely preventing this group from adding another high-level player. Henderson has improved and Clingan has had a fine rookie year patrolling the paint, but it's fair to wonder whether Portland's next foundational player is currently on this roster. Estimated return to relevance: Portland established itself over the back half of the season as a legitimately sound defensive team. But it's going to take a lot more than that to climb up the West standings. Right now, it's unclear how the talent boost is going to arrive.
Anyone who says trading the 14th pick in the draft for Deni Avidja, a player that was 23 years old, was a "win now move" doesn't deserve to be called an expert.
If it prevents you from getting 2 or 3 more similarly capable players (if we would have nailed those 2 picks, 14th and the other could be early lotto, and if we could have had a top 3 pick this year) it could lower our ceiling though. It's not about Deni as much as the potential we missed out on. If we were one piece away it was a good move. But even with Deni I feel like we're at least 2 pieces away. How do we add those pieces without giving up our other pieces if we're not drafting earlier? Where we stand now I feel like we're going to need the best performing front office and draft team in the league if we want to compete. I'm not sure we have that. I'm not sure we have what ot takes to put something like that together.
It doesn't, though. It's getting a player who can be a foundational player in the window that I think too many people here are fixated on. Getting a very good player is better than missing out on three players who weren't going to amount to anything, and Deni Avidja was a growing player just like Shaedon, Scoot, Camara and Clingan. Very few people thought of Deni Avidja as a guy that puts a team over the top when we acquired him. He was a good, cheap young player who's happened to turn out to be a lot better a lot faster than we expected him to. This is actually the smart way to rebuild. Buy low on someone who already has shown something in the league. There was no one at that point in the draft that was going to be as good a bet to succeed as Avidja. And, if you are just going to keep drafting players with the idea that you are going to draft high in perpetuity, that means you can't evaluate talent. You end up like the Sixers, who waited for years to get their great player but never had enough around him for it to matter. I get MM's sentiment. I get your sentiment. It's super to imagine we're going to get the sexy pick six years in a row and build this unbeatable squad just by being mired in crappy basketball. It doesn't work that way, most of the time. Look at the standings in the league every year and you'll see that. And, BTW, we still don't know where the balls will land in the lottery and we don't know what the Blazers will add through this year's lottery pick either by using it or trading it. Heck, for all we know we might trade five vets this offseason and be picking in completely different spots this year or next. So, anyway, I stand by what I said: Drafting a 23-year-old who hadn't done much in the league was not a "win-now" move, and shame on the ESPN for saying it was in hindsight. It's a hot take designed to get clicks, but taking 3 minutes to breathe and examine it shows no substance to it.
I'm not panicking. I'm just trying to figure out how we're going to add enough talent to overcome our disadvantages.
When we're at a point where we're arguing that Deni Avidja was too good a player to trade for if you're rebuilding, then we might as well be complaining that the Blazers screwed up by trading for Camara and drafting Shaedon and Scoot because their play also has put us in a worse position to get the top pick. The Blazers will be closer to be a legitimate contender next year by adding Konner Knueppel to this roster than the Wizards will be by adding Cooper Flagg to their roster, IMO.
How many draft opportunities did we trade away for those guys? I'm not sure it's the same. I'm not saying you're wrong. Adding Deni wasn't necessarily bad. Again, I love the kid. But giving up what we did (when we did it) may turn out to have been too much, too early. *Edit* or maybe just failing to actually full on tank was the problem... Or maybe we could luck out in the draft. Maybe there's an actual mechanism where the NBA does choose who deserves what pick. And maybe the way we played to close out this season actually does earn us a top three pick. That would be cool.
I didn't say you were panicking. The whole subject of my post to which you replied was that Deni Avidja wasn't a win-now move. It was a shrewd move that added another element to a young corps, just like we would have done had we drafted 14, except Deni had more a chance to hit, and he did, and ESPN is just throwing stuff out there to get us talking that really makes zero sense when you examine it. I think a lot of people fantasize about getting the belle of every ball and are disappointed that it probably won't happen without realizing the girl we're already dancing with is still pretty hot and has a nice personality, too. It's not the end of the world to be a good, improving team that's still got lottery resources. I'll say it one more time: Being upset over a likelihood when we don't know what is going to happen with the Blazers this offseason is a waste of energy. Imagining it is fine. But to the point that we're cursing our franchise for making smart moves because it pushes us farther from a No. 1 pick we never had a strong likelihood of getting is misguided. It's more about just wanting to get that player every year, but the unsaid part is that you have to be a failing franchise to be that if that is where you want to be.
OK, if you aren't saying adding Deni was a bad move, then why are we debating? I said ESPN was doing awful analysis by saying acquiring Deni was a win-now move. That no contenders this year traded for Deni is proof in itself it wasn't a win-now move, is it not? We gave up Malcolm Brogdon, the 14th pick and a 2029 first-round pick -- a year when we still have two first-rounders. What moves did you think were presentable for those assets that Deni? I can't think of any. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that NOT trading for Deni and just picking 14th in this last draft when a player like Deni was available to essentially be your 14th pick would have amounted to worse mismanagement than anything we've seen from the Blazers this season. One can argue about not moving Ant, Grant and Ayton. I think those are debatable. Debating that Deni Avidja was a move a team makes if it's trying to win now, to me, isn't really debatable. He hadn't accomplished enough in this league before this season to be more than an intriguing prospect.
