I disagree on that. Add another All Star to this team and they are in the playoffs for sure and probably move from a 789 team to a 345 team.
Whichever team gets VW will contend. He’s like Shaq and LeBron who took their original teams from the basement to Finals in 4 seasons.
Even if so, that's nowhere near being a contender. The DameCJ teams were 3 seeds twice and never a contender. Only longshot contender the Blazers have had was maybe the Aldridge team before Wes Achilles. When was the last Blazers contender before that? I'd say 2001 team before it collapsed when signing Rod Strickland. When will the next Blazers contender team be formed? Sadly, it's highly unlikely to happen during the remaining years of an all-star Dame Blazers career.
honestly, I'm not being antagonistic with this post...but I did chuckle a little seeing you post this and seeing the three posters who liked it. I'll grant that you guys are at least consistent. And you're going to be consistently unhappy because Dame is not being traded any time soon. Forget about that ship sailing, I don't think it ever left the harbor ********************************************* * "traded parts of our future for Grant"....wut? A 2025 Milwaukee 1st round pick? a couple of 2nds 4 and 5 years from now? When Portland got that 1st you guys were saying it was essentially worthless. Now it's a valuable future asset wasted? Bitching about those particular future parts seems to go off on a weird tangent to me * "Before we gave Ant such a large deal"....I agree on this, and I'd add Nurkic's deal too. I thought that Ant & Nurk's combined deals should be in the 30-35M/year range; not 43M/year. At the same time though, considering where the cap & tax are heading, an extra 8-12M/year is not much of a burden. And of course, if Ant continues his ascension and Nurk manages stays healthy, those deals might be more than fine * the way you framed the narrative with your view being 'realistic' and the opposing view being the HCA believers who would just ignore results if they weren't good is about 99.8% malarkey. I think the vast majority of Blazer fans, and posters here, stake out a middle ground that reaches from late lottery to perhaps the 6th seed. Now maybe, that will just be more mediocrity, but at the very least that mediocrity will have a much different flavor than the painfully stale mediocrity of the stupid fucking olshey decade which leads me to this thought: it sure seems to me that you and your 3 amigos, who have been railing about the trades for 9 months, somehow have convinced yourselves that the mediocrity of CJ-Powell-Nance was much better than whatever Grant-Hart-Sharpe can deliver. That just seems ridiculous to me. The team Portland had last January had absolutely no upside at all. It was baked into a dead end of purgatory. And it was boring as hell. Fuck that terminally ill team and the 7 years of reboots that olshey inflicted on all of us. Thankfully Oregon is a Death With Dignity state
Since the context of the post to which you responded was "contend" and "reach the finals", I would say Durant did exactly that with the team that drafted him.
You might have come to that conclusion, and maybe others think that, but I don't. We should have gotten rid of our borderline starters and Dame and built for the future. We should not have traded our borderline starters for basically the same level of guys AND give up value in the future (you might not care about what we gave up for Grant, but maybe you didn't care about he RoCo or Nance future value, either... it all adds up; part of the value of the dump deal we did was the pick, even if it didn't turn out to be much in the near term). We are in worse position now than we were this time last year, and that is in SPITE of adding Sharpe, which is a guy I really really like. We're older and we're deeper in salary cap hell and Dame's value is lower. I don't know if we are better now than we would have been without the trades and signings since Olshey was let go... I think we're about the same. And that's standing still, which is moving backwards relative to other teams in the conference and the league.
Same. I don't think anyone thinks CJ-Roco-Powell or Nance is so much better. I think we all just realize we are a play-in team wasting another year of Dame's prime while acknowledging he doesn't have many years left of his prime.
CJ 31 Powell 29 Nance 29 Grant 28 Hart 27 Sharpe 19 lol..."we're older" CJ 33.3M Powell 16.8M Nance 9.7M 56.8M Grant 20.9M Hart 13M Sharpe 6M 39.9M "deeper in salary cap hell"....uh huh
The age that matters is Dame. Another wasted prime year where we have ZERO chance of making any noise and being contenders.
Very misleading how you ignore the two large contracts the Blazers have for 4 more years and instead compare the prior veterans to a new unrelated rookie deal.
It's going to be tough to sell me on tanking again this year. I want the team to at least try to make this work.
They will try, and things will look up. There is too much fire power and once they get comfortable with roles, they will start clicking. When Payton & Winslow are in the rotation and ShaeDon getting more confidence, the team will be fun to watch. Rip City
