CJ will no longer be a poison pill contract. Crabbe will no longer have veto powers (not sure about the trade kicker, if that carries over.) We could trade Crabbe to Brooklyn in July. We will have a better idea of where our picks fall. I could see us making a trade before, or during, the draft.
Although the points you make are true, it doesn't change the fact that we still have vastly over-paid players and no cap flexibility. I'm not holding my breath on this. We're in a BIG DEEP hole, and it's going to take a lot of little moves & time to get out of it.
They've decided to go young since then, so the likelihood that they'll be interested actually increases.
You guys keep acting like the money would have still be there if we had waited. Dame's contract was about to kick in. CJ's contract was going to kick in this summer. The money was "use it or lose it." It was our one chance to add rotation pieces without giving up assets. Turner is not a bad player, and I really don't think he's that overpaid in the current market. Harkless and Meyers are on reasonable contracts for bench players in this market. Crabbe is overpaid for a bench player, but if someone values him as a starter, his contract isn't that unreasonable in this current market.
Neil kinda pointed towards using their picks for players as opposed to trade because he takes all this fucking pride in developing guys
I'm not sure about that. I'd think that part of their big offer to Crabbe was an expectation that he was a break-out candidate. After another season with no real improvement in his game, they may be less willing to gamble on a big jump forward.
We've already seen that that's not true. Portland couldn't have kept Plumlee because of those deals, whereas they could have in the absence of them. It also prevented Portland from being serious players for Noel, because there's no way they could afford to extend him. Now, I do think Olshey made a good trade with Plumlee, but the idea that the space between the cap and luxury tax is "use it or lose it, so it's okay to completely waste it" is not true. The "current market" is over. Analysts like Zach Lowe have been saying that teams over-leveraged (like, uh, one team we know) and are now scrambling to cut costs because they can't afford to sign their own impending free agents. The cap is barely going up, many fewer teams will have major cap space. Last season was unusual and created a bubble--contracts like Crabbe's, Turner's and Leonard's are the equivalent of stock in tech start-ups that were all hype. They're not going to suddenly start looking better with time.
Actually, no it's not. You don't have to have cap space to have cap flexibility. When you are within $1M of the tax line, you have no flexibility under the CBA (with what the owner is willing to spend).
