It wasn't a panic move, it was a move to bolster a team in the hunt for a championship now. Afflalo hasn't been paid as low as MLE since his rookie contract. Lillard was a lottery pick. I'll take more like that.
It was an overpay and it wasn't likely to repair the damage caused by Matthews' loss. We can label it however we wish, but it was a low-probability gamble to try and save a possible title-contending season. I don't think it was irrational, though; adversity sometimes requires less than optimal responses.
I moved to Portland in August of last year and got season tickets in March, starting with last playoffs. So, next year is my first full season of season tickets. Previously, I lived outside of DC and owned Wizards season tickets the year that John Wall got hurt early and the team started 0-13 (since I grew up in Baltimore, I've been an NBA orphan until I moved out here). I would really, really, like to have season tickets to a winning basketball team. That said, I agree with the sentiment that it's much better to be bottomed out than in the middle. The draft & draft lottery in the NBA favors teams that are awful. Fringe playoff contenders get stuck at the end of the lottery or in the mid-late teens, and it's rare to hit on players in that range.
Thanks! I'm a Blazers fan now. All-in. I'm not planning on moving away. I still vaguely follow the Wizards, and don't mind when they do well. But if the two teams met in the finals, I would be pulling for the Blazers to win each game by 40 points.
The problem with tanking is that you don't aren't guaranteed with a star player. Just the chance at one. Its,a roll of the dice. And sad to say, the Blazers were always one of the leagues better teams at best.
You have to suck and get lucky to suck in the right year. I mean look at this draft. There are 3 players in the whole draft that Curry was in that are franchise changers. And a lot of "misses" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_NBA_draft
In the big picture, Portland lost 4 pretty elite players in Z-bo, Roy, Oden and Aldridge with almost no compensation. (And really, looking back on the circumstances, there's a pretty good argument that management didn't really do anything wrong on any of these guys in that time period. Shit just happens sometimes.) Imagine the Spurs losing Leonard, Duncan, Parker and Ginobili over the past 8 years. Uncompensated. (Collectively, the talent of our Big 4 was probably even greater than these guys.) Popovich would probably be coaching a different team by now. The Spurs would be in full-on tank mode most likely. At best they would look a lot like us. Nobody would be citing them as a model for building on the fly. Sometimes bad things happen to good teams. It sucks, but there it is. I look at our current roster and, well, the nice thing about being a Blazer fan is that you know it always could be much more grim. We may not have this: But we also don't have this:
