I know this has been brought up a thousand times but imma do it again. Neil should try and get a meeting with Paul George this summer and convince him to work out a sign and trade with OKC.
He doesn’t want to leave OKC and his buddy Russ completely high and dry so this way OKC at least gets back a couple decent players and he’s now a 3 hr flight from LA while playing in a player first organization and a chance to make a run at the Larry O’Brien trophy should things fall our way.
Sounds ridiculous but it’s the type of creative thinking I’ve been waiting to see from Neil and at the very least it’s a worth a call to his agent.
In this extremely unlikely fantasy scenario?
Because if you’re going to lose George, you may as well pick up someone you like (evidently OKC likes Moe) instead of losing him for nothing. They’d also get our pick, giving them something they don’t have this year.
Guys c'mon, I am going to have to copy this post and paste it every time someone posts a sign-and-trade.
Sign-and-trades are not allowed if the team is over the tax apron at the conclusion of the trade. If they aren't over the tax apron then they are hard capped at the apron. So even if the Blazers managed to pull it off they'd be totally screwed. Here's why (going to use rounded numbers to make it easier to understand):
Expected luxury tax line: $121 million
Expected tax apron line: $125 million
Current Blazers Guaranteed Salary for 2018-19 (8 players): $110 million
Blazers Salary until they cut Baldwin, PapaG, and Layman: $115 million
Blazers Salary until they renounce free agents Nurk, Davis, PC, and Napier: $144 million
What these numbers mean is that the Blazers would not be able to do a sign-and-trade easily even if they weren't worried about being hard capped. A hard cap at $125 million means that the Blazers couldn't go over that number for ANY reason for the whole league year, so in this case through June 30th 2019. So right away in order to even do the sign-and-trade we'd have to renounce Davis, PC, and Napier to get under the tax line. They'd be gone, with almost no possibility to be kept. Nurkic would probably have to go too which I will explain why in a minute.
Okay so in this scenario I am going to show the most favorable trade possible for the Blazers, without factoring in what the Thunder would want, which in my opinion would be: Paul George $30 million max for Turner, Leonard, Swanigan, #24, and a 2020 1st round pick which is almost exactly the same as George's contract.
So after this trade we'd be at $113.5 million in contracts with 8 players under contract (Dame, CJ, George, Collins, Aminu, Harkless, Baldwin, and PapaG). I'd assume we cut Layman on June 30th before this trade could've happened. We'd still have the rights to Nurk with a cap hold of $8.8 million. Keep in mind we'd be hard capped at this point at $125 million. That means we'd have $11.5 million to sign 5 players (we'd have to reach the minimum) including Nurk. Now there is a little tiny bit of wiggle room by cutting any of the three non-guaranteed contracts of Baldwin or PapaG but the difference between them and a minimum contract somewhere else isn't big enough to really matter in this too much. Since we need 5 players we'd have to factor in 4 minimum contracts when re-signing Nurk (approximately $600,00 each). This means the absolute max we could offer Nurk at this point is about $9 million per year. If he signed any offer sheet with another team for more than that amount we would lose the right to match and he'd be theirs.
So lets say that happened and Nurk was gone too. We'd have PapaG as our only big man with basically only the MLE and undrafted free agents to fill out the roster. I guess we could still technically use the TPE's but we'd still only be able to accept $9 million back and still have to round out the roster with four minimum free agent rookies. We could offer Davis the MLE at $8 million.
Once again this scenario would only work if the Thunder accepted Turner and Leonard back which they wouldn't but I'll still play along and we'd have this roster:
Dame/Baldwin/Undrafted Rookie
CJ/ Undrafted Rookie
George/Harkless
Collins/Aminu/Undrafted Rookie
Davis/PapaG/Undrafted Rookie
The only trades we could make are ones that brought back both less money than we sent out and left room to sign more rookie free agents if we sent out more than we brought back. This would be the absolute best case scenario if every single thing broke perfectly in the Blazers favor. Unfortunately the OKC owner is cheap and won't want to stay in the luxury tax if it isn't for Paul George so he'd be gone.
Now to the only way to get Paul George, and no it has nothing to do with Olshey's creativity level. Dame and CJ would have to convince him to opt in to his contract a la Chris Paul last year forcing his way to Houston after James Harden convinced him to go there. The decision date for the opt in is before free agency starts so Olshey wouldn't even be allowed to talk to him. Basically George would have to feel so strongly about playing for the Blazers that he'd be willing to accept $10 million less for one season to come here and have to play next year without a long term contract. Even if we got this far, we'd still have to give OKC enough to not want him to just leave. They would never get anything close to fair value in this situation because George holds all the leverage. I would imagine if we got this far something like Harkless, Aminu, Swanigan, #24, and a 2020 1st would probably get it done. In this dream scenario we'd have the best of both worlds. No hard cap so we could go all-in and still use the TPE's, tax-MLE, re-sign any of our own free agents for whatever we wanted, AND we'd have the bird rights to George so we could offer him a max contract next summer too. The only downside to this if it happened is that George could just leave for nothing after next year and there would be nothing we could do to stop it. This trade would have to be done by June 29th as that is when George has until to opt in for next year.
Here is a projected roster in that scenario:
Dame/Napier/Baldwin
CJ/Ellington (tax-MLE)/PC
George/Turner/Layman
Collins/Faried (TPE if done before June 30th, just the first backup PF I could come up with)
Nurk/Davis/Leonard/PapaG
I really cringe every time someone mentions sign-and-trade this summer. I hope this helps.
