Just my opinion guys. Like I mentioned, I am very aware of how good he is. I think he's possibly our best player. But to take the TEAM to the next level, it might be necessary.
Three players have never won any championship. You gotta pay $ for your core starters. Not everyone can get as lucky as the Warriors did as far as draft picks go. Maybe we just did though..Never know.
This is exactly my point, 4 guys with > 100% of the salary cap means barely anything left for 11 remaining players
I would trade CJ and Collins for Porzingis. No hesitation on that one. Crabbe would match CJ's numbers with a lineup of Dame, Crabbe, ET, Porzingis, and Nurkic. He would get so many wide up 3s because our bigs would demand double teams.
I would certainly trade CJ and Collins for Porzingis. And maybe if Jackson is really so dumb as to alienate his best player (in terms of present and future value) and then trade him for less than his value, that would work. Or we prey upon another team looking to irrationally dump a superior player to CJ. But outside of such irrational acts, how are you going to upgrade in a trade? In a rational case, a team isn't going to trade a greater star for McCollum. You're either going to have to break him down into more, lesser players or else try to find an exact match for talent, which is pretty difficult. I actually think it might not be such a bad idea to look for a trade for McCollum in which you get back some intriguing young players that might blossom into good 3-and-D players. On paper it sounds good, but you have to contend with the history that generally the team getting the single best player wins the deal. The Blazers are in a tough position when it comes to reforming their core talent, so they'll probably just have to ride with Lillard/McCollum/Nurkic and hope to find the magic combination of complementary players.
What?! Collins is probably going to be better than Portzingis by himself. If we were going to trade CJ it should have been for Jimmy Butler, but that ship has sailed.
We are never going to sign a max player anyway. We'll need to trade for or draft that player. If we trade for that player it will be a player with some kind of baggage. Since we can't sign a good enough free agent (even with a ton of cap room) there is no reason to trade CJ unless we're getting 2 very high quality players in return (or one even better player). Welcome to being a Blazer fan.
I wonder how many of you, if any, would have traded CJ for Jimmy Butler. Sure sounds like none of you would have been on board which is puzzling
That would have been a good trade (for us). We get much better defensively. He's a far better player than CJ. And I like CJ.
So then what are you disagreeing with? Thats the sort of trade i'm advocating for (I guess you think that JB has some sort of baggage?)
I definitely would have, but that's an example of irrationality in action. The Bulls seems determined to trade Butler, even for less than full value, despite Butler being willing to stay in Chicago. If that kind of deal comes along, awesome! Most likely, it doesn't. I guess we just have to be ready to jump on the next Butler, Cousins, etc, who gets traded for less than top dollar. Porzingis would have been great, but it seems a lot like PhilJax was bluffing.
The only way Ix trade CJ if it was for a young player who had a higher potential upside than him. When your dealing with player that good then you have to make sure you get away with the player with the highest ceiling. But honestly, CJ is happy here and this team isn't built in such a way that we can't achieve long term success with his skill set.
