It's can't win, if he doesn't perform this coming year or doesn't stay healthy, if he performs then he's a restricted free agent and the Blazers can match any contract offer -- presumably teams are going to be a little leery of committing big time money to him with his injury history. I fully expect him to make somewhere close to Bynum level money when it's all said and done and that is in the neighborhood of LMA's deal.
Miller was signed with cap room. It didn't matter if we had Raef's insurance paid contract or we had kept Theo Ratliff's contract that ended the prior off-season, either way the team was in a position to sign Miller. Out of the recent 5 large expiring Blazer contracts I listed, none of them were traded for value. Raef, Nick Van Exel, Shareef, Damon, and Sabonis all had large contracts that expired on the Blazers payroll. During every one of those years fans have been speculating that the team would be be in a position to use them to acquire talent. It has never happened. Is it possible Pryzbilla's contract will be different? Sure, but I'm not going to expect a lopsided trade to happen. I'm not going to expect the team to add payroll when they just signed Camby to ~$25 million extension, have a possible Oden extension, and have a Batum extension kicking in the following off-season. I'll expect Pryzbilla to finish next season a Blazer and the team to keep the savings just as they've done 5 times before.
It means we're Title contenders for the next 10 years (unless Kevin Pritchard is gone in the next 3 years and doesn't get a chance to continue the A+ job he's done since he's been here).
