FIRST TRADE IDEA OF THE NEW SEASON!

[OneSport3]

There have been talks of teams like the Bulls, Raptors and Wizards possibly blowing it up soon. Once this happens I think a lot of dominoes will fall quickly. Portland will definitely be a buyer but it will be interesting to see where.

 

[wizenheimer]

There have been talks of teams like the Bulls, Raptors and Wizards possibly blowing it up soon. Once this happens I think a lot of dominoes will fall quickly. Portland will definitely be a buyer but it will be interesting to see where.

problem for the Blazers is they are under the tax line by only 70K and hard-capped

another is about the only tradable contracts on disposable players are Winslow and Payton. I do not think Portland can afford to trade Hart, not for what they could get in return

 

[OneSport3]

problem for the Blazers is they are under the tax line by only 70K and hard-capped

another is about the only tradable contracts on disposable players are Winslow and Payton. I do not think Portland can afford to trade Hart, not for what they could get in return

I don’t pretend to know much about cap issues/CBA so I solely rely on others who are more familiar with the rules. I recently saw Bobby Marks say that although Portland is hard-capped, they can get creative and still make some moves. Obviously their biggest tradeable asset right now is Josh Hart. And although I absolutely love Hart, if we can upgrade in any way (OG Anunoby for instance), I would move Hart. However with Portland’s current situation, a realistic trade for OG would be probably be complex and would have to involve multiple teams.

 

[Pinwheel1]

I absolutely love Hart, if we can upgrade in any way (OG Anunoby for instance), I would move Hart. However with Portland’s current situation, a realistic trade for OG would be probably be complex and would have to involve multiple teams.

I think it is very debatable that OG is an upgrade over Hart. Even though Hart's stats are better than OG's, I would not even go by that to determine his value to this team. The only advantage I see for OG is his wing span.

 

[HansenYang]

I don’t pretend to know much about cap issues/CBA so I solely rely on others who are more familiar with the rules. I recently saw Bobby Marks say that although Portland is hard-capped, they can get creative and still make some moves. Obviously their biggest tradeable asset right now is Josh Hart. And although I absolutely love Hart, if we can upgrade in any way (OG Anunoby for instance), I would move Hart. However with Portland’s current situation, a realistic trade for OG would be probably be complex and would have to involve multiple teams.

The short version is:

+ Portland can take back no more than ~$6M in salary than they send out due to the hard-cap. Portland has an open roster spot & the Ro-Co TPE, so in theory they don't have to send anyone out.

+ Portland sits ~$70k under the Lux-Tax. That is close enough that they can't even sign anyone to a 10-day contract without going into the tax. The biggest factor is that if Portland goes into the tax, then they loose out on the distribution from all the lux-tax teams. This will likely be ~$12M-$15M.

So the primary question in evaluating most deals this year will be 'Is (player) worth paying an extra $12M to obtain?' For a star, the answer is yes. For a mid-tier player (like OG) - I'm not sure what the answer is.

 

[HailBlazers]

Yeah I don't see us making any trades this season.

 

[illmatic99]

reading about the possibility of jody prioritizing a luxury tax payment from other teams instead of incrementally improving a playoff team makes my blood boil. there is no line for me. for a guy like OG, it's obvious. Hell, I would probably even go into the tax for a low-tier backup who would improve our team like Otto Porter or Zach Collins.

this is a league where you have to pay to win. we wouldn't even be a "repeater" next year if we get in the tax this year. this would not even hinder our ability to add to the team this offseason. the only hit is on Jody's pocket and i can't give one damn about a person about to make billions of profit on a sale losing 12-15 mil.

 

[Natebishop3]

reading about the possibility of jody prioritizing a luxury tax payment from other teams instead of incrementally improving a playoff team makes my blood boil. there is no line for me. for a guy like OG, it's obvious. Hell, I would probably even go into the tax for a low-tier backup who would improve our team like Otto Porter or Zach Collins.

this is a league where you have to pay to win. we wouldn't even be a "repeater" next year if we get in the tax this year. this would not even hinder our ability to add to the team this offseason. the only hit is on Jody's pocket and i can't give one damn about a person about to make billions of profit on a sale losing 12-15 mil.

Doesn't it all just come out of the estate anyway? I don't know why she cares.

 

[OneSport3]

reading about the possibility of jody prioritizing a luxury tax payment from other teams instead of incrementally improving a playoff team makes my blood boil. there is no line for me. for a guy like OG, it's obvious. Hell, I would probably even go into the tax for a low-tier backup who would improve our team like Otto Porter or Zach Collins.

this is a league where you have to pay to win. we wouldn't even be a "repeater" next year if we get in the tax this year. this would not even hinder our ability to add to the team this offseason. the only hit is on Jody's pocket and i can't give one damn about a person about to make billions of profit on a sale losing 12-15 mil.

This is a penny-pinching franchise when it doesn't need to be. The profit they will make from the sale will be astronomical.

I mean the preseason decision to not travel the broadcast team for road games said enough about their priorities.

 

[illmatic99]

Doesn't it all just come out of the estate anyway? I don't know why she cares.

when i say "jody," i mean bert/estate/vulcan/etc for all intents and purposes.

 

[illmatic99]

This is a penny-pinching franchise when it doesn't need to be. The profit they will make from the sale will be astronomical.

I mean the preseason decision to not travel the broadcast team for road games said enough about their priorities.

Come February, if we still are in shot of a HCA spot in the wide open west, we better get in the tax. I'm least bit bothered about that. More concerned with giving up draft picks.

 

[Natebishop3]

when i say "jody," i mean bert/estate/vulcan/etc for all intents and purposes.

I just wish they'd sell the fucking team. I'm so tired of Bert pretending to be the owner.

 

[Pinwheel1]

This is a penny-pinching franchise when it doesn't need to be. The profit they will make from the sale will be astronomical.

I mean the preseason decision to not travel the broadcast team for road games said enough about their priorities.

Yet they have no problem overpaying the players they have. Is that really penny-pinching? I doubt Jody is worried about the money. If they can get a difference maker I doubt they will turn it down.

 

[HansenYang]

reading about the possibility of jody prioritizing a luxury tax payment from other teams instead of incrementally improving a playoff team makes my blood boil. there is no line for me. for a guy like OG, it's obvious. Hell, I would probably even go into the tax for a low-tier backup who would improve our team like Otto Porter or Zach Collins.

this is a league where you have to pay to win. we wouldn't even be a "repeater" next year if we get in the tax this year. this would not even hinder our ability to add to the team this offseason. the only hit is on Jody's pocket and i can't give one damn about a person about to make billions of profit on a sale losing 12-15 mil.

This is one of the most petulant and whiny comments that I have read in a long time.

 

[illmatic99]

This is one of the most petulant and whiny comments that I have read in a long time.

lol happy to help i guess.

But clarify this for me: you're OK with prioritizing the bottom line if it comes at the cost of winning? 2.5 games separate the 1 seed with the 6 seed at this moment. Extrapolating this over the season, this difference might be ~7 games at the end. Essentially seeds 1-6 being a game or two apart from each other. If the Vulcan estate losing out on 15 mil means we are a 4 seed with HCA instead of 5 seed, this is NOT worth it for you? How much revenue do you think a Game 7 at home will bring Jody to make it worth her while then? You mentioned that even OG might not be worth crossing this hypothetical threshold, which just baffles my mind.

Please save me your patronizing over my feelings of this bullshit. I've continually maintained that I will not care one bit about a billionaire losing a few million here and there.

 

[HailBlazers]

It makes the most sense IMO to push off the repeater clock. Don't see us being contenders this year no matter what.

 

[illmatic99]

It makes the most sense IMO to push off the repeater clock. Don't see us being contenders this year no matter what.

a "repeater" is considered as such if a team is above the tax for at least three of its previous four seasons. Getting into the tax this year has no bearing on this clock for next year. It only begins to matter in 2026-27 essentially, since we have already reset the clock.

Given the contract extensions for Dame/Ant/Jerami, this is all going to be moot as is since we have no way to reset the clock moving forward. It's just a question of do you want it to start being punitive in 26-27 or 27-28?

Someone please correct me if I have not understood this...

 

[HansenYang]

lol happy to help i guess.

But clarify this for me: you're OK with prioritizing the bottom line if it comes at the cost of winning? 2.5 games separate the 1 seed with the 6 seed at this moment. Extrapolating this over the season, this difference might be ~7 games at the end. Essentially seeds 1-6 being a game or two apart from each other. If the Vulcan estate losing out on 15 mil means we are a 4 seed with HCA instead of 5 seed, this is NOT worth it for you? How much revenue do you think a Game 7 at home will bring Jody to make it worth her while then? You mentioned that even OG might not be worth crossing this hypothetical threshold, which just baffles my mind.

At a cost of winning what? I don't see Portland as realistic title contender this season.

It really depends upon the scenario. Put out a realistic trade scenario and we can evaluate it. In 90+% of the cases, I'd argue that the win differential would be 1-2 regular season games at most.


The issue I have is the notion that "more salary <=> better team". They are not synonymous.

Please save me your patronizing over my feelings of this bullshit. I've continually maintained that I will not care one bit about a billionaire losing a few million here and there.

It's always easy to spend someone else's money...

 

[Cugel]

I don't see a deal to be made that makes this team a contender anyways. What is the hypothetical deal? OG does not make this team a contender. It could benefit from a second superstar.

 

[andalusian]

OG plays like dpoy this year, I can't see Toronto moving him

 

[illmatic99]

At a cost of winning what? I don't see Portland as realistic title contender this season.

It really depends upon the scenario. Put out a realistic trade scenario and we can evaluate it. In 90+% of the cases, I'd argue that the win differential would be 1-2 regular season games at most.

We have had multiple scenarios every year when even just one game has meant the difference between HCA and not.

The issue I have is the notion that "more salary <=> better team". They are not synonymous.

I just did a really quick regression model of just last year alone of wins vs active payrolls (i do this kinda stuff for a living, fwiw). If you take just take the entire league as is and consider all outliers (such as MEM with a bunch of rookie deals winning 56 games, or LAL winning only 33 with a bunch of injuries), the correlation is admittedly weak with barely a .25 r-squared.


But let's bin this into tax v no tax, you start to see the bigger difference (after removal of outliers I mentioned earlier).



Obviously, you see teams over and under-performing every year, but with a larger sample size, I think that relationship of salary vs wins is a fairly obvious one that would result in a good correlation and possibly a linear regression model. For reference, I work in pharma and we build predictive models and make go, no-go decisions on correlations with r-squared values around 0.3 or 0.4 at times.

It's always easy to spend someone else's money...

Ya, no shit. I don't have a net worth of 25 billion to know how it feels. But we have a reference point of another owner who did.

What do you think Paul Allen would have done?

 

[PtldPlatypus]

I don't see a deal to be made that makes this team a contender anyways. What is the hypothetical deal? OG does not make this team a contender. It could benefit from a second superstar.

If the context of the discussion is "if this team is in HCA range near the deadline", then there's no reason to think that an upgrade of some sort couldn't get an already-HCA-level team into the contention conversation.

 

[Cugel]

This is clearly not a HCA team. More likely a perpetual play-in level team, at least for the next few years.

 

[Cugel]

I like to snoop in other forums, and Raptor's fans sure seem in love with Sharpe, Ant too.

 

[illmatic99]

Ya no thanks.

 

[Fairly-Hard]

Ya no thanks.

But you want them to go into the tax to get him?
I don’t know what else it would take?

 

[illmatic99]

But you want them to go into the tax to get him?
I don’t know what else it would take?

?

I'd gladly take on OG if the price were reasonable (Ant is my cutoff point). But if they want Sharpe and a bunch of picks, I draw the line. My concern is assets not tax.

 

[UKRAINEFAN]

It's always easy to spend someone else's money...

It's really the fans' money (well, except for a few freeloaders like me). They buy the tickets and pay for the TV packages.

 

[speeds]

OG for Herb Jones & Dyson Daniels pls

 

[speeds]

FVV is a good fit in Dallas but I'm not sure they'd want to give up the picks to get him.