FIRE CRONIN

[LayneStaley]

If we win it I think it might be best to trade Dame. Build it around Ant/Jabari. That 2025 pick would help that timeline a hella of a lot better.

 

[SlyPokerCat]

Safe to say "Big Picture Thinking" is not this threads forte.
I'm out.

Giving up talent for less talent sure is big picture thinking. Now we have less tradeable assets to put together to actually trade for stars. We will be back here next year and you will continue to say just wait. Rinse and repeat.

 

[LayneStaley]

If we land number 3 I’d be interested to see if we took Ivey and packaged Hart in a Grant trade.

 

[SlyPokerCat]

Tell me the players we could have gotten for CJ. I'm waiting to see.

Nobody is saying we could have traded CJ for a star. We wanted the CJ and Dame backcourt to be broken up as much as anyone else. Cronin should have at least worked the Lakers pick into the pick that could have conveyed to us. Instead of a shit asset of the Bucks 2025 1st that is 3 years from now. That will do a lot of good for us with Dame being 35 paying him 55+ million being a treadmill team if we still kept him.

Get a real GM in here to handle this offseason. I would take Danny Ainge in a heartbeat over Cronin right now.

 

[Cugel]

There is no way to realitically make a contending roster with these assets , at least on paper. Cannot rule out the team plays incredibly well as constructed: Dame Ant Nas Nurk and probably Winslow. That is probably your 5 starters unless Cronin trades the pick for Grant, a horrible idea IMHO.

 

[OneSport3]

Nobody is saying we could have traded CJ for a star. We wanted the CJ and Dame backcourt to be broken up as much as anyone else. Cronin should have at least worked the Lakers pick into the pick that could have conveyed to us. Instead of a shit asset of the Bucks 2025 1st that is 3 years from now. That will do a lot of good for us with Dame being 35 paying him 55+ million being a treadmill team if we still kept him.

Get a real GM in here to handle this offseason. I would take Danny Ainge in a heartbeat over Cronin right now.

Cronin’s leverage was taken away when the ORGANIZATION decided to take care of CJ and let him have input and pick the team he wanted to go to. I’m pretty sure this was a decision that came from above Cronin.

 

[SlyPokerCat]

Cronin’s leverage was taken away when the ORGANIZATION decided to take care of CJ and let him have input and pick the team he wanted to go to. I’m pretty sure this was a decision that came from above Cronin.

If the organization is doing that, it makes the "wait until the offseason is over" crowd look foolish. Nothing will change on that front. And if ownership stays, we certainly need someone as GM that would argue/persuade the owners.

I don't buy all this though. Cronin, even with marching orders from the owners. Could have tried to include the Lakers pick as the first backup to the Pelicans pick. Why in the world would New Orleans have said no at the time? The Lakers were looking like they were going to make the playoffs and if something happened where the pelicans leapfrogged them for some reason, it would have given us the pick.

 

[wizenheimer]

Cronin gave up assets to get cap room, but cap room has almost no value in Portland.

no, he did not. This was never about cap-space. It was about being able to re-sign Simons and Nurkic without having a 90M tax bill next year. AND, it was about dismantling the idiotic dead-end-of-purgatory roster that olshey assembled

I'm not a Cronin fan and in fact prefer if he was not the GM approaching the draft. But to pine for Olshey is fucking nuts

 

[Hoopguru]

Joe speaks about cap room: After Trade deadline

Quick: Joe, you talked about the different options: cap room, trade exception. Have you done any intel on that? Because cap room generally hasn't been a good way for Portland to go. So are you confident that with the trade exception, you have options?

Cronin: Yes. And cap room isn't just in free agency for free agent signings. You can also use it for trades as well. So really the cap room for us is a way to have the optionality in order to go above the $21 million trade exception. So we have the trade exception that you can either trade and acquire with, or you can sign-and-trade free agents into the cap room. It just gives us another vehicle to increase on that $21 million, so if we need to get to a $30 million number, we can back out further with the cap, even in the trade. So that's one thought. And then as far as free agency goes, we're confident that we can go out and be competitive in our recruiting. I think with Chauncey Billups, me and Lillard, I think that we will get in meetings and we will paint a very good picture of this organization and this city. And we're not going to run from players that we think make sense here.

 

[1 Eye Jack]

If we land number 3 I’d be interested to see if we took Ivey and packaged Hart in a Grant trade.

If we land top 3 pick we could potentially trade for say someone like Collins from Atlanta, Butler from Miami or another star who’s team got outed in playoffs. Not to say we will but that at least opens up a lot of possibilities.

 

[Cugel]

I think you might have to start considering dealing Ant and the lottery pick if you want high returns. Outside of Dame his value is highest. Someone with CBA knowledge should start some hypothetical packages to see who could be landed, just for fun, natch.

What would it look like to go with Dame and Hart? Clearly would need BU PG at that point.

 

[Mediocre Man]

If we land top 3 pick we could potentially trade for say someone like Collins from Atlanta, Butler from Miami or another star who’s team got outed in playoffs. Not to say we will but that at least opens up a lot of possibilities.

Yuck on Collins

 

[blazerkor]

Cronin isn't doing the same thing. He's doing what he did to have maneuverability . Most of the previous GM's were stagnant in movement. Or self pitying. I'm just saying, let the man do his job. Then when it's all over, if it's not to your liking, you can jump off ship, or go wait on your hillside for the end to come.

The man doesn't have the job, it's not yet his to do and his idea of picking up draft capitol that wasn't solidly ours and having it convey so he could use it as the asset that went out in an unbalanced trade using the TPE obviously backfired in a huge huge way. So when something like that happens during the application process for a job, when an applicant (not the actual GM) gambles and loses, why then should we give that applicant the job? If he was hampered in the deal making process by the interim tag why then would he trade 4 of his seven best players including three of his starters and unquestionably his second best player? The other thing I'm wondering is when Cronin is talking like he's keeping Ant and Nurk who will almost certainly put him over the cap where is this maneuverability that people in here keep talking about? If we use the full MLE to get a somewhat impact free agent then we've given up the ability to use the highly touted 21M TPE we created, if we use the TPE and our first rounder to acquire Jerami Grant that's just not enough to get for the tanking and the lack of talent we got back in the two big trades we made and if the idea is to add Ingles to that mix by re-signing him wow we're really in a bad way because he'd fallen out of the starting lineup with the Jazz, he was at a career low in three point percentage and impact defensive numbers when he went down with an injury that can't help a player whose game already looked like it was going downhill do to age.

So no thank you, if I have a choice I will not sit back and root for the team to continue to let Cronin execute his vision because the execution to this point has been very poor. He might have had a vision but if it was a good plan or not, a huge part of it has already failed disastrously. I would just like a GM who didn't learn under the previous GM's that you just stated were stagnant because honestly, I see a pretty stagnant off season coming our way where we re-sign current players and maybe add a player too young to significantly have an impact on the plan to immediately build a contender around Dame on his own or we once again like the previous stagnant GMs did trade a promising pick for a known NBA name that has never done well enough to be an all star and we saw how fruitful that strategy has been.

No, you don't paint a picture that separates Joe from the guys he learned the league under, so no I don't want to give him a chance to continue to take less in return for the few assets we have. Give me a new GM and mostly new front office so we can get away from this decade or more of stagnation that most of the people controlling our roster right now were a huge part of. If the team does the wrong thing though, don't tell us that don't like it to jump off the ship or go wait for the end to come. Blindly following someone's bungling doesn't make you more of a fan. So I won't give up on my team and I will continue to hope for better from it.

 

[e_blazer]

The man doesn't have the job, it's not yet his to do and his idea of picking up draft capitol that wasn't solidly ours and having it convey so he could use it as the asset that went out in an unbalanced trade using the TPE obviously backfired in a huge huge way. So when something like that happens during the application process for a job, when an applicant (not the actual GM) gambles and loses, why then should we give that applicant the job? If he was hampered in the deal making process by the interim tag why then would he trade 4 of his seven best players including three of his starters and unquestionably his second best player? The other thing I'm wondering is when Cronin is talking like he's keeping Ant and Nurk who will almost certainly put him over the cap where is this maneuverability that people in here keep talking about? If we use the full MLE to get a somewhat impact free agent then we've given up the ability to use the highly touted 21M TPE we created, if we use the TPE and our first rounder to acquire Jerami Grant that's just not enough to get for the tanking and the lack of talent we got back in the two big trades we made and if the idea is to add Ingles to that mix by re-signing him wow we're really in a bad way because he'd fallen out of the starting lineup with the Jazz, he was at a career low in three point percentage and impact defensive numbers when he went down with an injury that can't help a player whose game already looked like it was going downhill do to age.

So no thank you, if I have a choice I will not sit back and root for the team to continue to let Cronin execute his vision because the execution to this point has been very poor. He might have had a vision but if it was a good plan or not, a huge part of it has already failed disastrously. I would just like a GM who didn't learn under the previous GM's that you just stated were stagnant because honestly, I see a pretty stagnant off season coming our way where we re-sign current players and maybe add a player too young to significantly have an impact on the plan to immediately build a contender around Dame on his own or we once again like the previous stagnant GMs did trade a promising pick for a known NBA name that has never done well enough to be an all star and we saw how fruitful that strategy has been.

No, you don't paint a picture that separates Joe from the guys he learned the league under, so no I don't want to give him a chance to continue to take less in return for the few assets we have. Give me a new GM and mostly new front office so we can get away from this decade or more of stagnation that most of the people controlling our roster right now were a huge part of. If the team does the wrong thing though, don't tell us that don't like it to jump off the ship or go wait for the end to come. Blindly following someone's bungling doesn't make you more of a fan. So I won't give up on my team and I will continue to hope for better from it.

I don't know whether Cronin can make gold out of the assets he's left with or if he's just trying to spin it out of straw. I don't know his position with Jody Allen as far as getting the job full time. All I know is that as of now he's the interim GM of the team I've rooted for for the past 50 years. As long as that's the case, I hope he hits nothing but home runs this summer.

 

[blazerkor]

I don't know whether Cronin can make gold out of the assets he's left with or if he's just trying to spin it out of straw. I don't know his position with Jody Allen as far as getting the job full time. All I know is that as of now he's the interim GM of the team I've rooted for for the past 50 years. As long as that's the case, I hope he hits nothing but home runs this summer.

I hope he's not in the position by the time the draft lottery comes and therefore I don't have to watch him whiff again on any ill conceived home run swings this summer but if he is the one making the big decisions I'll have no choice but to hope contrary to what I see as recently learned common sense about the guy, that he is in fact capable of hitting nothing but home runs going forward, as apposed to what we've seen from him thus far.

 

[BonesJones]

What star free agent to people think we could sign that'd make sense? I don't think there's one...

 

[Cugel]

who is a realistic trade target for that matter?

 

[Mediocre Man]

If you listen to Dame’s interview where he compares himself to Giannis, Dame is thinking complimentary players.

Dame wants to be the star
Dame wants to be the man

What this team needs, if that’s the case, are guys that don’t need the ball to be effective.

Dame and Ant, just like Dame and CJ won’t work.

Dame needs a Klay Thompson. Great shooter off screens and a great perimeter defender

 

[Rastapopoulos]

If we land number 3 I’d be interested to see if we took Ivey and packaged Hart in a Grant trade.

Hart>Grant IMO

 

[SlyPokerCat]

 

[BonesJones]

Joe speaks about cap room: After Trade deadline

Quick: Joe, you talked about the different options: cap room, trade exception. Have you done any intel on that? Because cap room generally hasn't been a good way for Portland to go. So are you confident that with the trade exception, you have options?

Cronin: Yes. And cap room isn't just in free agency for free agent signings. You can also use it for trades as well. So really the cap room for us is a way to have the optionality in order to go above the $21 million trade exception. So we have the trade exception that you can either trade and acquire with, or you can sign-and-trade free agents into the cap room. It just gives us another vehicle to increase on that $21 million, so if we need to get to a $30 million number, we can back out further with the cap, even in the trade. So that's one thought. And then as far as free agency goes, we're confident that we can go out and be competitive in our recruiting. I think with Chauncey Billups, me and Lillard, I think that we will get in meetings and we will paint a very good picture of this organization and this city. And we're not going to run from players that we think make sense here.

Hm, so he wants the option to either trade for a player making $30M, but doesn't have the assets to do so... Or he thinks he has a chance at signing a star free agent when the only star free agents this year are guards... Genius plan.

 

[blazerkor]

Hm, so he wants to option to either trade for a player making $30M, but doesn't have the assets to do so... Or he thinks he has a chance at signing a star free agent when the only star free agents this year are guards... Genius plan.

His plan was to hope that CJ didn't make the Pelicans better, for us to tank to get a high pick and to use the pick he was sure we'd get from the Pelicans to trade for Grant who would fit into the TPE. His bullshit about flexibility and them being able to attract free agents was just that because he followed it up with clearing a runway for Ant, Nurk being a free agent who is a major priority and how uneven trades were our best tool for adding talent and the TPE was really important. All of his plans went to shit with that Pelicans win and the fact is that as a GM you can't have such fragile plans.

Joe fucking sucks and if this ownership group doesn't pick a different person to make the decisions that create our roster for next season and going forward I'm going to be furious, even more angry than I already am that we gave up all of the guys we did and got back Hart, Winslow, Johnson, a 2025 first from the team that will still have the best all around player in the league on it and some seconds. Fucking ridiculous. I don't care if they hire a President of Basketball Ops to make sure Cronin can't fuck up again and give Cronin the title of GM or they just throw his ass out but he better not be in charge.

Edit: I actually do care, my preference is that they purge us of all of Olshey's front office and give someone new with no ties to the former regime a chance to build their own and execute their vision. But if Vulcan is too spineless or cares to little to do that at least make sure we have a new person at the top to keep the rest from fucking us all over.

 

[oldmangrouch]

BTW, if you think Blazer fans are delusional, we can't hold a candle to Laker fans. Tonight I ran across 2 proposals from LA flacks. I had never heard of the guys and won't even waste time linking the articles - but here is the gist.

Idea 1. Obtain Butler from Miami for Westbrick.

Idea 2. A 4-way deal with all sorts of moving parts, but the core of the trade is Dame to the Lakers, LeBron to the Warriors, and Westbrick to Portland. OKC would also be involved, tossing in some of their stashed draft picks for crap.

Delusional doesn't begin to cover it, but I thought it was worth a chuckle! Just my feeble attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

 

[oldmangrouch]

His plan was to hope that CJ didn't make the Pelicans better, for us to tank to get a high pick and to use the pick he was sure we'd get from the Pelicans to trade for Grant who would fit into the TPE. His bullshit about flexibility and them being able to attract free agents was just that because he followed it up with clearing a runway for Ant, Nurk being a free agent who is a major priority and how uneven trades were our best tool for adding talent and the TPE was really important. All of his plans went to shit with that Pelicans win and the fact is that as a GM you can't have such fragile plans.

Joe fucking sucks and if this ownership group doesn't pick a different person to make the decisions that create our roster for next season and going forward I'm going to be furious, even more angry than I already am that we gave up all of the guys we did and got back Hart, Winslow, Johnson, a 2025 first from the team that will still have the best all around player in the league on it and some seconds. Fucking ridiculous. I don't care if they hire a President of Basketball Ops to make sure Cronin can't fuck up again and give Cronin the title of GM or they just throw his ass out but he better not be in charge.

Edit: I actually do care, my preference is that they purge us of all of Olshey's front office and give someone new with no ties to the former regime a chance to build their own and execute their vision. But if Vulcan is too spineless or cares to little to do that at least make sure we have a new person at the top to keep the rest from fucking us all over.

Purging the front office is critical. The day Olshey was fired I argued he wasn't the type to surround himself with subordinates who were smarter than he was. Cronin has done nothing to disprove that theory. One of the prerequisites for the job is knowing the difference between "planning" and "hoping"!

 

[BonesJones]

His plan was to hope that CJ didn't make the Pelicans better, for us to tank to get a high pick and to use the pick he was sure we'd get from the Pelicans to trade for Grant who would fit into the TPE. His bullshit about flexibility and them being able to attract free agents was just that because he followed it up with clearing a runway for Ant, Nurk being a free agent who is a major priority and how uneven trades were our best tool for adding talent and the TPE was really important. All of his plans went to shit with that Pelicans win and the fact is that as a GM you can't have such fragile plans.

Joe fucking sucks and if this ownership group doesn't pick a different person to make the decisions that create our roster for next season and going forward I'm going to be furious, even more angry than I already am that we gave up all of the guys we did and got back Hart, Winslow, Johnson, a 2025 first from the team that will still have the best all around player in the league on it and some seconds. Fucking ridiculous. I don't care if they hire a President of Basketball Ops to make sure Cronin can't fuck up again and give Cronin the title of GM or they just throw his ass out but he better not be in charge.

Edit: I actually do care, my preference is that they purge us of all of Olshey's front office and give someone new with no ties to the former regime a chance to build their own and execute their vision. But if Vulcan is too spineless or cares to little to do that at least make sure we have a new person at the top to keep the rest from fucking us all over.

If his plan was to hope that CJ didn't make the Pelicans better then he should be fired today.

 

[Hoopguru]

If his plan was to hope that CJ didn't make the Pelicans better then he should be fired today.

Yeah, Im sure he knew CJ would be a dominate piece for them. But for me, it's starts at the top with ownership. We will soon see if they feel he's earned that position or if something else is in play.
Seasons over, they should either give him the job or move on. But we know right now, there is a strong get rid of Cronin outburst happening and he'll either be dismissed as GM or maybe he will make many of us it crow down the line?

 

[BoBoBREWSKI]

I'm sorry, but some of you are very out of touch with NBA reality. CJ isn't as valuable of an asset as many of you thought he was. Nobody wanted him and his contract.

 

[SlyPokerCat]

I'm sorry, but some of you are very out of touch with NBA reality. CJ isn't as valuable of an asset as many of you thought he was. Nobody wanted him and his contract.

Do you really think having New Orleans add in the Lakers pick if we didn't get the Pelicans would have called off the deal?

That isn't out of touch with reality. It is common sense.

 

[SlyPokerDog]

I'm sorry, but some of you are very out of touch with NBA reality. CJ isn't as valuable of an asset as many of you thought he was. Nobody wanted him and his contract.

Do you think his trade value is higher now than when we traded him?

 

[SharpesTriumph]

If you listen to Dame’s interview where he compares himself to Giannis, Dame is thinking complimentary players.

Dame wants to be the star
Dame wants to be the man

What this team needs, if that’s the case, are guys that don’t need the ball to be effective.

Dame and Ant, just like Dame and CJ won’t work.

Dame needs a Klay Thompson. Great shooter off screens and a great perimeter defender

Great point, Dame needs excellent two way players to contend.

Too bad the Blazers traded 4 starters away for Josh Hart and Didi. So now it will be much harder to damn near impossible to build such a contending team around Dame.

The Blazers are now at a crossroads with a few realistic options to build;
1 Trade away youth/picks for win now veterans and fail at contending
2 Trade Dame and rebuild
3 Keep Dame and rebuild as the Lakers did with an old Kobe

Never thought in a few months Neil Olshey could look like one of the most amazing Blazer GM's... somehow Cronin accomplished that.