Winning is the great elixir. When Dame and Blazers management kiss and makeup, and the team starts rollin', this will all become a distant memory. We shall see how many in here stay pissed off.
Nah, don't even care if he plays. He took large portions of the last 2 seasons off and nobody cared. Just don't act this way publicly.
Relax, I'm not calling out anyone on this forum. The RipCityTwo offers a unique perspective into a wide ranging interpretations about the Blazers and the NBA in general. We got a teardown, we got a rebuild. Cronin lied his ass off then put Lillard stickers everywhere to cover his tracks during this process. Right now it's trendy to jock out and pick on the fans who simply express endearment for Damian Lillard, who played his tail off for over a decade in Portland. sorry, I won't be joining that frat pack.
First of all, I am with you in your sentiment that we take the best offer and that Dame, no matter how unhappy, will play. He's too proud to just half-a** it on the court. However, what his agent is doing--while not necessarily keeping other teams from making offers--is he is lowering the value of those offers. That lowering makes Miami more competitive with their garbage. The end result is Miami is more competitive in the bidding process than they otherwise would be. The worst part about this is it is a coordinated effort between Dame, his agent, and the Heat front office. It is clearly tampering, but tampering with a loophole, so they can get away with it. The only response to this kind of market influence is for Cronin to refuse to yield. It will extremely difficult for him to do so.
Listening to Haynes. He said that he checked with the league and the players association and no team has ever publicly confirmed a trade request while it was happening. So that's why he said that Dame could, if he wanted, comment publicly on the trade request/demand. He said that the fine was $100k for a player publicly demanding a trade, and with the new CBA it actually goes up to $150k. So it definitely seems like we did that deliberately.
Has he? He traded for Shaq, but that helped both teams. Wouldn't call that a swindle. He got Bosh and LeBron to come to Miami and that's cool but he didn't swindle anyone to make that happen. He traded for Jimmy Butler when he was thought of as an unproductive malcontent. That worked out pretty well, a shrewd move in hindsight, but at the time I didn't think of it as a swindle. It's entirely possible he's swindled a bunch of GMs and I just don't remember those deals. But I don't remember hearing about a Miami deal and thinking they really swindled the other team.
If true, that's an absolute dumpster fire villain level move on the part of Dame's camp. Absolute travesty if true and I'm now inclined to refuse to trade him to Miami and tell them he's not going there and force them to blow me away to trade him there. I'm not sure where this noise is coming from, but whoever it is, is a fucking asshole of gigantic proportions.
You trade him for the most value you can get in return. Spite is never a good overriding factor in decision making.
Again, I'm not trading him to Miami spite isn't a good factor, now go tell that to Dame's camp. This is one of the worst, if not THE worst examples of a player holding a team ransom I've ever seen. I'm starting to dislike my all time favorite player and this saga is starting to sour me on the NBA as a whole. I'm absolutely astonished at how vile Dame's camp has been. It's like they WANT Portland to get fucked over as if that is their goal and not even getting Dame to Miami. It's absolutely vile.
Trade Dame for the guys he wanted to play with...send him to Toronto for OG and Siakam....Nurk for Poetzl ..done deal..throw in a down jacket
Lillard needs to be a good robot and do exactly what he's been programmed for. I believe the human element gets lost in armchair GM'ing.
