Exclusive Ayton is agreeing to buyout

Not defending Cronin, but the best description is "get rid of Nurk"

 

They'll need that saliva later for when they're spitting in frustration.

Although we'll probably have to endure a lot of highlights of Doncic throwing lobs to Ayton in the early days, so be ready for that.

 

It is fair in a vacuum but unrealistic, imho, without context.

You needed Ayton's salary to make the Dame trade which also allowed the team to get off the Nurkic salary, get Tou, contributed to the Deni trade and brought additional picks in the future. That's a very easy to explain transaction. It's a bummer they could not revive his career here - but that was an experiment worth taking because DA is very talented. There was hope that a change of scenery is all he needed, unfortunately, that was not so.

The Ant contract is also easy to explain, reasonable contract before the new CBA implications were understood, young player, worth giving him a try and it did expire before new contract to the new draftees were required. If the punitive new CBA did not happen, Ant would have been easy to move. They still managed to move him (and 2 SRP that they already replenished) for a much better player that should help with the team character and defensive identity. Sure, there are issues (Age, Contract), but the Blazers did manage to upgrade the talent for sure.

Grant is the big issue, his contract was a late ditch effort to keep Dame, it was also more palatable before the new CBA implications were obvious.

The good news is that despite all of these transitional moves - the Blazers still managed to find talent in all these position and are much better positioned to be good in the future.

 

Great post. At first I was really disappointed they did this, but when you think about it at least they have not compounded a mistake by taking on even more salaries to squeeze some value out of an asset that had little value to extract. If we have watchable basketball next year and some roster flexibility, this will have been a big reason why.

 

Lebron knows Ayton is not the guy you want. DA thinks he is a first option

 

Ayton gave up his bird rights in this deal, which is kinda crazy. He must be getting at least a decent offer because no team is signing him for anything near 20M next year.

 

In the game of basketball, some people guard the other teams biggest players while other players are better at putting the ball in the basket. We have different needs and expectations for different players....

 

he will ball out, it's contract year

 

NAW plays good defense, has averaged over 38% from 3 in each of the last 3 years, and is a former Blazer. Midlevel would be a nice raise for him, too.

 

cap space will be increased by the exact amount his buy-out is below his 35.5M salary; plus 1/2 his new salary with another team - 1.2M

 

No motor, no value.

 

For some players, signing a humongous, life-altering contract is their undoing. My working theory is that Ayton is one of those people.

 

probably not. He may be signing an MLE-level deal for 3 years within the next 2 weeks

 

I actually wouldnt be shocked if he plays well for the Lakers. Luka and LeBron are clearly the leaders of that team and Ayton will defer to them. In Portland Ayton thought he was one of the leaders of the team - he probably believed he was the best player.

Plus if Lakers only pay him a small contracts they have very little risk with plenty of options to go a different direction later. Quite different than when he came to PDX as the highest paid Blazer.

 

We have too many competitors for him - he's one of the hot names.

 

We have 4 lotto picks in what I hope is our starting squad. 3 of those are pick 4 or higher. Go look at the graph of who becomes allstars, and you'll see its mostly just such players. Every player's game has holes in it. Don't know why you ignore nonBlazers when looking at that.

 

You can use these same type of justifications to explain Meyers Leonard, Allen Crabbe, and Evan Turner contracts.

At some point these need to be judged as mistakes and dumb moves. I don't expect the GM to be perfect. But literally what is one single positive value contract to a vet Cronin has handed out?

I do like a lot of Cronin draft picks and acquiring Deni/Camara were home runs. But its perfectly reasonable to be critical of the moves that accomplished nothing to get this franchise closer to contention.

 

agreed, but people keep wanting a name, and it's not impossible that we get him.

 

Nurkic because it allowed him to make the Tou, Deni trades.

It seems unreasonable to me to accept that Tou and Deni were home runs when they were part of the DA trade, but than be upset that he did not get even more value form DA when you just said you do not expect him to hit everything.

It was a swing for the fences, parts of it worked, parts did not, that's fine.

But, if you want to complain about every part of the transaction, go ahead. I choose to look at it as the "cost of doing business".