Trade Deadline: February 6, 2025

I don't buy the whole "Bert Kolde made me do it excuse"...I think that's way too convenient of ass-cover for Cronin. Not saying he's the one putting that excuse out there but for damn sure people around the team appear to be whispering it

I don't think Bert told Cronin to sign Gary Payton. I don't believe Bert told Cronin to give Simon, Nurkic, and and Grant 340M dollars. Bert didn't demand that Cronin match the offer sheet to Thybulle. And Bert didn't insist that Cronin trade for Ayton and Timelord; or that he invest a 7th pick on Clingan and give him to a coach that would play Ayton 32 minutes and Clingan 6 minutes in a game when the opposing C is Gobert...a perfect foil for Clingan

this is Cronin's team. Simons is the only player left that Cronin inherited, and there was some reporting that Cronin convinced Olshey to focus on Simons in the 2018 draft.

I don't specifically remember Cronin saying the things you mentioned, but it does not surprise me. It's pretty easy to say anything when you're straddling a fence. A lot harder, apparently, to pick one side of the fence to step onto

 

new dallas owner on the Luka trade:




guy is out of his mind.

i'd take Jody over this kinda bullshit.

 

That’s the thing… it’s not great but it could always be worse.

 

An absentee non-owner is better than a bad owner, I agree with that. You can ask Knicks fans even though they're doing well now, their meddling owner has fucked up a lot of opportunities for them. You can ask Washington Commanders fans about Snyder, he's sabotaged them on multiple occasions. So having a trust managing non-ownership group is better than having a micro managing idiotic one but having one that cares, will invest and is willing to let the basketball experts do what they're paying them to do would be better than what we currently have. So yeah it could be worse but it could most definitely also be better.

 

Me too.

 

Now Shaq had a great work ethic and was in top shape?

 

This guy knows nothing about basketball, be just happens to be married to a lady with a loaded mom.

 

Ah, that would be the most delusional thing he’s said

 

Lmao, like 10-15 posters have basically said the same thing to that guy, dude has his head so far up his own ass he thinks he is always right ans everyone else is wrong.

Just another reason to avoid any discussions with that guy

 

Ringer has thoughts on five teams that did nothing:
Why Did These Five Teams Do Nothing at the NBA Trade Deadline?
Only five teams sat out the busiest NBA trade deadline in history. Will they regret standing still? We examine the ripple effects for the Nuggets, Wolves, and more.

Getty Images/Ringer illustration
After a transformative week during which a league-record 63 players were dealt before the NBA trade deadline, only five teams did not, in any form, make a move: the Portland Trail Blazers, Orlando Magic, Brooklyn Nets, Denver Nuggets, and Minnesota Timberwolves.

A few more teams barely did anything—the Boston Celtics, Oklahoma City Thunder, and Indiana Pacers, for example, nickeled-and-dimed their way through relatively insignificant transactions—but no others sat completely still, both on the day of the trade deadline and during the entire month leading up to it. There are similarities among these five organizations, but no unifying theme to connect their passivity. No overarching statement to be gleaned and then spun into a meaningful trend. A couple of them are all-in contenders, one is ascending through unfortunate growing pains, and the other two are near the start of a rebuild. Their inertia is important, though.

Here’s a critical look at each stagnant situation and whether everything these teams didn’t do should be recognized as prudent or unimaginative. (At the end of each section, a one-word verdict will be applied.)

Portland Trail Blazers
The Trail Blazers have somehow won 10 of their past 12 games and deserve a standing ovation for the restraint they showed on Thursday, not taking all their assets and pushing them front and center for a chance to win the 2025 NBA title. (That was a joke. Sort of.)


Portland is 23-31, a spunky 13-seed that’s only 4.5 games back of the play-in. It’s also spinning its wheels, trudging through an increasingly paradoxical rebuild that can now, fairly, be categorized as bizarre. In the short term, Portland’s roster is tantalizing, explosive, and somewhat nonsensical. Its core players, several of whom are extension eligible this summer, may not be compatible with one another, and none are clear foundational centerpieces.

The Trail Blazers clearly aren’t going full bore on a youth movement, Jerami Grant, Deandre Ayton, and Robert Williams III are all (when healthy) in Chauncey Billups’s rotation. While veteran leadership can certainly bring value to a green team, there’s also something to be said about developing young players by, like, putting them on the court at the same time. Lineups that feature Shaedon Sharpe, Scoot Henderson, and Donovan Clingan—the team’s three most recent lottery picks—have played only 145 minutes this season, and they haven’t started a game together since November 20.

The Blazers have made it unnecessarily hard to figure out who should be part of the organization’s next growth cycle, a perplexing dilemma when you realize that all but four players on this roster are under contract next season, too. Yes, Portland will likely have another lottery pick in what’s expected to be a deep draft. But the strategy, right now, all feels a bit too circumspect.

Winning is intoxicating. But would it have made sense to be a little more aggressive about moving off Williams and Grant or potentially even selling high on Anfernee Simons? (Assuming that the market for any of those three could yield positive draft capital in a league full of teams so desperate to win.) There are a lot of questions, and I don’t have all the answers. But I really hope that the Blazers weren’t hoodwinked by their own recent success. That would be criminally shortsighted, regardless of how formidable they’ve looked over the past six weeks. Since January 1, the Thunder and Clippers are the only teams that rank higher in defensive rating, which might be the most unbelievable stat I’ve read all season.

Adding to the frustration: Reports have trickled out that Portland wasn’t particularly close to completing any deals. “We know a lot of fans, and probably a lot of people in here, prefer a little bit of action,” Blazers general manager Joe Cronin said. “Often, we do too. We’re always looking for ways to participate in these windows and find guys who can help us be better. But this time around, we just didn’t find the value. So, we decided to pass.”


The trade deadline can be an inflection point for any franchise mired in the wilderness of a prolonged rebuild. By sitting this one out, Portland tacked another level of uncertainty on top of a plan that’s yet to take shape.

One-word verdict: Bizarre
https://www.theringer.com/2025/02/11/nba/nba-trade-deadline-2025-nuggets-wolves-magic

 

the evaluation was accurate, but way too mild in it's criticism

bizarre is mild. Idiotic; timid; confusion dereliction, re-boot city, WTF may also work as a verdict

 

This question really really pains me to ask but would you consider our pick plus Sharpe for pick 2 or 3? I really love Sharpes talent and probably wouldn’t but his pension to defer is driving me crazy. He’s easily our most talented offensive prospect guy can score 20 without trying. Problem he floats, and is content to defer to veterans. That’s why it was so important to trade Ant and Grant. I remember last year or year before were we turned over the keys to him and he went for 25 several games in a row and looked like the star we drafted.

 

depends who is available and BPA. But if it's a wing or SG than probably

 

The writer should have just summed it up by using the term "Fools Gold."

 

I agree with your post. I would certainly consider it. But of bigger concern is who will the coach be next season? How quickly can they get a new one hired? Is the best candidate with a playoff team? I think having the coach in place prior to making deals is job one.

 

Yes i would consider since it seems that Billups is failing in his effort to get Sharpe to play defense.

 

Jody and the rest of the Vulcans are fine with a mediocre team. It's a money maker, after all. They want to try and win a few games here (hence the inactivity at the deadline) and there and maybe just maybe make the playoffs now and then. There aint a lot a fan can do about it other than wait for the team to be sold.

 

The trade deadline on its own is fine, hard to know if anything decent was offered and it can be difficult to integrate players mid season which is less important for the Blazers but possibly important for trade partners.

The main problem is we are in year 4 of this rebuild and have collected this group of worthless overpaid vets for YEARS. It didn't make sense to have these pieces for sure when we traded Dame if not much earlier. But after trading Dame there was a training camp to trade these vets, a trade deadline, a draft, a free agency period, an offseason, a training camp, and now another trade deadline. All those opportunities have passed with zero action.

One period of time with no actions is fine. But SEVEN opportunities to do something and zero actions being done??? That is just a bad NBA GM.