A couple of thoughts on this:
- The commitment to rebuilding/tanking should have been made when we fired Olshey. Before we traded parts of our future for Grant. Before we gave Ant such a large deal. Before we gave Dame half of Oregon as an extension.
- The team has looked lousy in the preseason, but there's been nothing that should change anyone's mind about how successful this team is going to be... I see our team being mediocre, best case, over the next couple of years and so I see the results so far this preseason and nod my head, thinking I have stuff figured out. Others who see a team that will challenge for HCA will look at the the results and shrug and presumably say the games don't matter, and they'll have the same optimism that the current roster will gel and stay healthy and do all the goo d things.
honestly, I'm not being antagonistic with this post...but I did chuckle a little seeing you post this and seeing the three posters who liked it. I'll grant that you guys are at least consistent. And you're going to be consistently unhappy because Dame is not being traded any time soon. Forget about that ship sailing, I don't think it ever left the harbor
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* "
traded parts of our future for Grant"....wut? A 2025 Milwaukee 1st round pick? a couple of 2nds 4 and 5 years from now? When Portland got that 1st you guys were saying it was essentially worthless. Now it's a valuable future asset wasted? Bitching about those particular future parts seems to go off on a weird tangent to me
* "
Before we gave Ant such a large deal"....I agree on this, and I'd add Nurkic's deal too. I thought that Ant & Nurk's combined deals should be in the 30-35M/year range; not 43M/year. At the same time though, considering where the cap & tax are heading, an extra 8-12M/year is not much of a burden. And of course, if Ant continues his ascension and Nurk manages stays healthy, those deals might be more than fine
* the way you framed the narrative with your view being '
realistic' and the opposing view being the HCA believers who would just ignore results if they weren't good is about 99.8% malarkey. I think the vast majority of Blazer fans, and posters here, stake out a middle ground that reaches from late lottery to perhaps the 6th seed. Now maybe, that will just be more mediocrity, but at the very least that mediocrity will have a much different flavor than the painfully stale mediocrity of the stupid fucking olshey decade
which leads me to this thought: it sure seems to me that you and your 3 amigos, who have been railing about the trades for 9 months, somehow have convinced yourselves that the mediocrity of
CJ-Powell-Nance was much better than whatever
Grant-Hart-Sharpe can deliver. That just seems ridiculous to me. The team Portland had last January had absolutely no upside at all. It was baked into a dead end of purgatory. And it was boring as hell. Fuck that terminally ill team and the 7 years of reboots that olshey inflicted on all of us. Thankfully Oregon is a Death With Dignity state
