Bogus! We are quietly doing Philly's lame "process"

Yup.

Imagine if their lineup was

Booker
Ingram
Tatum
Embiid

Being in the lottery is about having a chance to draft a star. Then it's up to your front office. And so far I think our front office has had a really good eye for talent at the position their picking.

Sharpe
Scoot
Walker
Rupert
Murray is still questionable for me.

 

And how confident are you that our current governing team will do better (or faster), and even develop the talent as well or better than Philly has?

I'm... Not confident. Not dubious perhaps, but probably apprehensive.

 

I've been pretty clear that I think Portland has crappy ownership and that crappiness flows downhill, a lot

I'm also pretty skeptical about Cronin, but that mostly centers around 3 players: Ant-Grant-Ayton. It bothers me that Cronin had apparently coveted Ayton for 2-3 seasons. Generally, I don't think Ayton is the type of C that has much of a positive impact on winning. If his numbers aren't simply hollow, they are at least neutral. But with his salary, that's an expensive neutral

but mostly is a suspicion I have but Cronin could cancel that suspicion by future moves. My suspicion is that he has every intention of building around his idea of a 'big-3' core of Ant-Grant-Ayton, and my view is that none of those players is good enough or complete enough to be core pieces for any good team. Again. maybe he's holding his cards close, but if he goes ahead with those guys as the Blazer core, the Blazers are getting all their future mail delivered to an address in Purgatory

 

Agreed. This is my concern as well. I may not be as concerned about Ayton, but definitely about the rest.

Hoping he proves me wrong.

 

I would take crappy ownership over the empty chair we have now.

 

I too agree with most of this. I am just not as hard on Ayton because he is the perfect player to have IF Cronin jettisons Ant/Grant/Brogdon. Portland will need a big salary to keep them above the threshold while they are auditioning draft picks and young guys. Ayton's big salary will be halved when Scoot/Sharpe are eligible or earn new deals. Or Ayton gets traded or walks. I concede he is not worth his money. I have zero problems with Ayton. I respect that you do.

 

How would you know?

 

It's been reported. Links have been posted. Read up the thread. The deal was agreed to in principle before the Dame trade. Before anybody even knew Milwaukee was interested in Dame.

 

Pretty sure they wanted a decent wing in return though, even if it wasn't Allen. It was just interchangeable based on who that 3rd team would be. For instance Miami probably would have needed to be Caleb Martin.

 

Then why are you confident they'll do better trying to build a contender immediately?

 

I'm not confident in anything good happening with Jody in charge.

However, the hardest part of becoming a contender is getting All Stars. We already had an All Star. We now have no All Stars.

Regardless of who is charge it's easier to add 1 or 2 All Stars than 2 or 3 All Stars.

 

That may be. But we didn't have to trade Dame to make that happen.

 

Riiight. How many all stars did we add to Dame?

 

That's what I'm being critical of... That was a huge failure. We went from 2 All Stars to 1. And never came back from that. Absolute and abject failure.

 

Probably, but it depended on who Phoenix liked at the Wing and what we would have had to move to get it.

I don't know your back and forth on this. But Dame on our team with Ayton instead of Nas and Nurkic still makes me think we'd be a play in team.

 

When Dame was in his 20s I would've agreed.

As he was well into his 30s..... I just see that chance as having been long gone.

I was always on board with the DameCJ duo because if they had got a Paul George / Siakam / Brown / etc type of forward SOMEHOW that could've been a contending trio. Instead we had Aminu/Roco/etc type of forward - or worse. Just never happened.

But once the Clippers trade was done and this team had no assets to get vets - the Dame contending era was completely shut.

I'm not depressed with rebuilding - more depressed that this current roster doesn't have one great young player to build around and is now slotted at pick 3/4 approaching an epically awful draft.

 

Agreed. It really started with that year we beat the Clippers in the playoffs. Handed out huge contracts to scrubs and signed Turner for 70 million when he was earning 2 million. After our contract he was out of the league. Hamstrung the team financially with little options for 4 years.

Then the 3 pick draft only getting Collins.

Kind of amazing Dame and Terry accomplished all they did here.

 

Might get used to it. Getting great players or All Stars is hard. Real hard. Especially if you have no reason for them to want to be there.

I'd gladly take making the play-in with Dame as long as possible. At least you have a chance.

 

We weren't a playin team with Dame for 2 years. Had Jerami Grant and Hart with them too. You think Ayton over Nurk elevates us that much?

 

A chance of what? They never had a chance to contend since Aldridge/Wes. I was tired of watching Dame jack up ISO shots and not play defense for a losing team. Was only going to get worse each year as he aged. Dame missed the playin his last two years here.