OT Donavan Mitchell trade watch

My comment was in regards to the terrible Minnesota GM's over the prior 10-20 years when they made all the shitty lottery picks others mentioned. Not the current Minnesota GM.

 

You are correct, its a league mostly mediocre team with a few in each conference that are legit contenders.

 

I just looked, Boston has been to 3 of the prior 5 ECF going to a game 7 and winning games in two of the other series. Then obviously winning it last year in their 4th ECF to get to the finals.

Tatum has had much more playoff success than Michael Jordan at the same age.

Dame has meanwhile won 0 conference finals games and is 8 years older than Tatum. I'd love to have Dames teams with this "yet to win a championship" lack of success.

Instead we get to root for a Blazers roster with a depth chart of 8 guards, slightly into the luxury tax, navigate hard cap restrictions, and have 120-1 title odds in a 3 way tie with the Hornets/Cavs. Celtics are ranked #1.

At least we got Didi and a bunch of "flexibility" in that Clippers trade so we can make all these big improvements posters around here have been saying Cronin can now bring.

 

If “this” - this being the value of someone like Mitchell. How is this hard to understand? “This” package for Mitchell. Obviously the deal hasn’t been made. And if they end up getting Evan Fournier and the corpse of Dave Debusshere back then congrats.

 

looks a lot like some Jazz fan's fantasy. Like the fan just went thru the Knick roster and added every single young player he saw, then piled on the draft picks. Maybe the Knicks would be that crazy, but to take that speculation and say it's a reason Portland should trade Lillard seems like a stretch well beyond a breaking point...
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as far as the Gobert trade, here's what I see: those advocating to trade Dame have a refrain they repeat over and over: that being that Portland can't build a contender around Dame, so trade him

so for trading Gobert, the Jazz got Malik Beasley (convicted felon); Patrick Beverly (2 years older than Dame); & Jarred Vanderbilt. So then, Portland couldn't build a contender around Dame but they could around Beasley and Vanderbilt? Yeah...that's as dumb as it sounds. Oh wait...what about the draft picks? 2023 and 2025 could very well be in the 20's...maybe even later 20's. The 2026 swap may not even happen. So that leaves 2027 and 2029; 5 and 7 years from now. That's a damn long time to wait for a contending asset. Simons might be 3 years gone by 2029

 

Piling up first round picks gives you options. They can get - you guessed it - traded! You don’t HAVE to use them in 2025 and 2027 or 2029. Or, we can have our own picks (what’s left) , 13 role players and Lillard. I have yet to read one plausible plan for building a championship with Lillard. Taking into consideration every guy on the team, the cap, our existing picks.

 

Your plan is less plausible. That's the problem with your post. It may be 15 years before we get a player as good as Dame again no matter what picks we have.

 

In the end the Blazers would be in position where they'd be desperate for a superstar, especially one that wanted to be in Portland. I'd rather not spit in Dame's face and set the precedent that we won't return loyalty to players while expecting them to be loyal to us, just to end up wishing we had someone exactly like Damian Lillard.

 

Exactly.

 

If you are going to trade Lillard you have to get a rising superstar or established All-Star talent. Not just picks and role players.
The other possibility is you have a rising superstar already that you feel could actually replace Lillard.

 

I mean duh..... we have Jabari Walker.

 

I’m not a status quo person. It “may be” isn’t a reason to do nothing. Maybe - just maybe- that’s why we are in this predicament. We might not have a superstar for 15 years seems unlikely. But yay let’s go be the 7/8 seed again.

 

So instead we set the precedent that if you are a star here we will sit around and surround you with role players for 15 years until you ride off in the sunset. The extreme loyalty that everyone thinks a pro sports team is supposed to show might be the reason the team is in the situation it’s in.

 

There were fans and reporters who thought like you do in Denver in January of 1997. The Broncos had just suffered a brutal playoff loss, after being ahead, to the Jags. Reporters were writing, time to trade Elway and see what you can get. This team has peaked. It's all over. The Broncos and owner Pat Bowlen said BUNK to that. They retooled, added some key veterans, and Bam! 2 straight Super Bowl victories. Maybe could have had a third if Elway hadn't retired. Sometimes patience and loyalty pay off.

 

you were the one who just used the Gobert trade as an example of why Portland should trade Dame. And you're also the one arguing that having a bunch of role-players won't cut it. But Gobert was traded for role players, and the reality is they are not high-level role players. He was also traded for that "haul" of draft picks the trade-Dame crowd is always pining for. But the chances any of those picks thru 2026 will amount to much is small, maybe real small. The hope would be a higher draft pick in 2027 or 2029.

That's trading Dame for a roll of the dice 5 to 7 years from now, and that makes little sense. Essentially you are arguing that Portland should trade an elite player for the off-chance what they trade him for might eventually turn into an elite player, years from now

and, as I said earlier, like it or not Dame's extension makes him harder to trade and ratchets down his trade value. There would be no godfather offers for him

 

- I think Damian would get more than Gobert (prior to extension). And 5 1st round picks is a haul no matter how you want to water it down. It just is. I dont care about the other guys like Beasley etc.
- Again, collecting 1st rounders is helpful. They are assets that can be traded for other 1sts sooner, or players. Whatever puts them in a position to win.
- Agree his extension makes this all moot. It was ridiculous.
- If someone thinks there is more than a 5% chance that this roster, with Lillard, is going to win a championship during his tenure, I would love to know how that looks. Who has any value on this roster and what picks do they have that will build it. Unless you think that Jerami Grant and Nurkic and Lillard are going to leapfrog the other 15 teams better than them right now. If you/no one has that potential strategy, then you are saying that settling for a low-end playoff seed, maybe winning a series, and riding out Lillard till he retires is preferable to making changes. And this would be coming from the same group of people who railed against Olshey for settling, keeping people too long, and not taking chances. I dont get it.

 

Pretty awesome that we get another 5-6 years of being mediocre.

 

I hear you except the fact that NFL QBs tend to play at a high level for a long long time (Brady, Rodgers, Manning, Brees). Like into 40's. NBA point guards do not.

 

in 2015 I was calling for Olshey to be fired; a year before his spending spree in 2016. I said he was a mediocre GM who would build a mediocre team. I also said it was obvious he was going all-in on CJ and that a Dame/CJ back court would not work...ever.

I was a lone voice in the wilderness. I was alone on the fire-olshey train and many people said I was dead wrong about olshey. But just about every thing I said about that idiot came to pass, And 6 years after I said olshey had to be fired, I was not alone on the fire-olshey train anymore. It was SRO and everybody had a pitchfork. But what I saw for 6 years was people willing to accept mediocrity; people telling me that CJ was all-star talent; people telling me that olshey was a master of drafting: people telling me avery off-season that "finally, this season, Olshey has built a contender". None of it was true, ever

so I'm not real sympathetic to those worried about 5-6 more years of mediocrity. Especially when the logic is "we're mediocre now so lets trade the one elite talent we have for a bunch of mediocre assets; that's the way to get an elite player"

 

In my view, the issue under Olshey was not as much his doubling down on Dame and CJ from a talent standpoint as it was his willingness to throw enough money at that backcourt that it became impossible to address needs at other positions with anything other than mediocre talent. But, ding dong, Olshey's reign as GM is dead. I'm concerned that the Dame extension coupled with Ant's money puts the Blazers in the similar cap constraints, but there's no arguing that Grant is a far better PF than anyone that Dame has played with since LA left. If Nurk stays healthy and one or two of the young guns blow up, there will be opportunities to bolster the SF position.