CJ isn't even a close to being an allstar, there's no way he shouldn't be untouchable. Olshey has made minimal moves, when you have a first team all NBA talent on your team, that's disgraceful to not even try to make a championship team.
I agree with this, but it's entirely possible that First Team All-NBA talent is the reason why CJ is untouchable.
That could very well be....and until that is remedied, this team isn't going anywhere. I've been on that train for 3 years now and don't see anything that is going to change my mind anytime soon.
We all blame Olshey on this but I'll bet you Dame says something like "CJ and I need help!" not "I need help!"
"Trade CJ trade CJ blah blah blah" FOR WHO??? Tobias Harris? Lillard is 29 this summer. Unless you think we can win a championship within the next 3 years with him as the leader, there's a case to be made for blowing it ALL up this summer.
Sadly, if he is adamant on it being him and CJ, that is 40% of your lineup that requires defensive help at almost every turn and put a huge amount of pressure on your bigs in terms of defensive presence and picking up fouls guarding other team's PG/SG.
I truly believe if we had a GM that had vision, balls and the desire to win a ring, a team could be built around Lillard that can win a championship.
It's not that easy to climb onto top tier. Maybe if the Spurs preferred CJ over DeRozan which is unlikely... Pritchard also seemed to be too biased to trade PG for CJ. Right now i feel as if the train has passed. The build is too weak and too flawed in order to soar high enough and Dame is approaching 30 with a supermax contract in sight. The fan in me wants to see Dame in rip city forever, even after his retirement, but it makes more sense to rebuild.
The plan seems to be to give it until 2020, which means one more summer of trying something. If that doesn't do it then you have to blow it up. FWIW, I don't disagree with you about the fading options. The odds of pulling something out are declining by the day. You could keep the young players, develop the bigs while accumulating talent through the draft. Keep: Simons, Trent, Layman, Collins, Nurkic, Skal and pull in a load of draft picks and young players for Dame and CJ and start over. That would give you a couple years to let the bigs mature and retool. You can't do anything at this point until this summer, but if they can't move CJ for a needle mover then I wouldn't mind seeing Dame moved somewhere he could win.
The vision was locked in during that summer of 16. We were gonna try and win with that overpaid core hoping that players would naturally develop. Didn't happen, and now we're stuck with this shit.
To be honest, we don't really know anything. Olshey solidified his reign of terror when he fired that bigman coach who couldn't keep his mouth shut. The only things i do know about our front office: - They are lazy, they don't audition players for those final roster spots as they should and they fail to see that some of our guys are nothing more than placeholders. - They fall in love with mediocre talent, they are not objective when they value their worth and then they overpay those players for no reason. - They are too scared to fire Stotts because that would mean 3 month of Venterpool\Nate running the team. I begged for them to fire Stotts last year because i knew coach Budenholzer's contract is expiring, i waited 2 years for that to happen lol Maybe our next chance is to fire Stotts NOW and wait for Walton to become avilable?
I wasn't able to watch the game live and I am forcing myself to watch it now. Hood just hit a turn around jumper in the key to put the Blazers up 15 with 10:36 left. Knowing they only score 5 points the rest of the game is fucking crazy.
