Dame tanking our leverage to force his way out is really no more laughable than Joe secretly rebuilding while lying to Dame's face about trying to make trades.
We don't know if either one is true, or more likely than the other.
I said this in another post, but Occam's Razor seems like the best way of looking at this. The simplest explanation is preferable to one that is more complex. Dame was already getting frustrated with the team for asking him to tank, he wasn't excited about the idea of mentoring another 19 year old rookie, and he vented to the media. Intentionally or unintentionally, his comments hurt our leverage. Joe genuinely wanted to keep Dame, and was doing his best to go out and get players that he thought would help the team win. But as Joe said "whether even internally if we thought that well, hey we’re going in the right direction here, we can get there pretty quickly… if he didn’t feel that it was still a failure on my end.”