This is important. The blazers weren’t considered “cheap”...ever. McGowan came in and it was fire employees, cut costs, etc (although no jersey sponsor which is weird). Neil comes in same time. He gets to spend on free agents one summer but outside that it’s been pretty bare bones - find young first rounders on the cheap and kickstart their careers. As I said before numerous times, ownership makes/breaks so many deals that it’s almost impossible to judge a GM. Not totally impossible but let’s say Neil said “we can make a run at Evan Turner” and Paul said yes throw whatever you want at him. And maybe Neil said hey we can go after X player and Paul said no way. Happens all the time. What if Neil had a deal on the table for Blake Griffin and Allen vetoed it?
I don't know if I believe you, and I see that you're posting it as if you only think it's hypotheticals....
We went from swept by the one seed to swept by the six seed. Does that deserve celebration? Try as you might you can’t quite polish this turd enough to make people believe it’s value can you?
So, you're in the dump Lillard camp? He went from fantastic playoff stats to crappy playoff stats. If that's your metric, man up, and call for Lillard's head. Stretch his ass, he's a "turd".
Oh man did I touch a nerve, no I do not want to trade dame. Calling for his head is not how you ‘man up’. I’m not in the dump dame camp at all but action needs to be taken before he simply has to be. Yes waiting is the safe option if you think you can sign dame and cj to new contracts. What I’m telling you is, it won’t happen if we do nothing with a middling roster every year. If the blazers really hope to keep dame around and maybe cj we gotta show them something. We gotta put a team together that can go on a real run. Time is running out. Next year is unrealistic maybe you could say in two or three years we could be playing meaningful playoff games? But any later and it’s too late we lost cj and very possibly dame because of our lack of movement to improve the team. If we stay in this perpetual three year cycle in which we find ourselves it’s going To be very hard to convince them to stay.
I don't think Dame and CJ will leave, but we do have some common ground. I too think that we need to be careful not to waste their primes. It would be much better to compete sooner than when Dame is 34. I also agree that we need more help, right now. I'm just more willing to wait until training camp until I panic.
Most stars who request multiple meetings with ownership because they don’t see where the franchise is headed and then tweet out “heartbreak” and “peace out time” tweets aren’t what I’d call happy with the current state of affairs. If you think Dame isn’t upset with how the offseason is going you are kidding urself.
Dame doesn't like losing any teammates but he understands that this is a business. He already addressed Clownzano's report that he requested a second meeting, refuting it. Dame hasn't shown "disenchantment" at all.
Lillard's tweets show passive resistance, such as rebellious emojis, to these events. And he did not explicitly refute that he asked to see Allen again. We already discussed that back then.
