The 'Next' Move

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Who would we trade to Indiana for Turner? Nurkic? I dunno what we have that they would want
 
Brad Botkin (CBS Sports) has an article speculating the Lillard is going as well.

https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/...rebuild-by-trading-norman-powell-for-nothing/

Damian Lillard doesn't seem long for Blazers, who started their rebuild by trading Norman Powell for nothing
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CJ McCollum feels like the next domino to fall, and after that, you can connect the dots

If you want, you can spin this that Portland is trying to create more financial flexibility to continue building around Damian Lillard, but I find that story tough to buy. Even if the Blazers renounce everyone possible, save for Anfernee Simons, they're going to be over the salary cap this summer. They could trade CJ McCollum for a bunch of expiring deals to try to create some room in 2023, but Lillard will be 33 years old by then.

So now Powell, McCollum and Jusuf Nurkic are gone. Since when did Portland, even with a little cap space, become a free-agent hotbed that is going to attract a bunch of big-time players to not serve as just replacements for McCollum, Powell and Nurkic, but actual upgrades?

Not going to happen.

This is the start of a rebuild, plain and simple.

Now if Lillard is cool with heading up a rebuild, fine. But let's not spin this as the Blazers are going to be better in six months or even a year than they could've been this season with a fully healthy roster. They got worse when they traded Powell, and they're going to get worse again whenever they trade McCollum, which feels inevitable.

How does any of this add up to Lillard staying in Portland to ride out the rest of his prime on a bad team? When Powell was cashed in for nothing, that was the first domino. McCollum will be the second. After that, let's connect the dots. There's a better than good chance that Lillard will not be playing in Portland next season.

In one sense, I hate to say that. I love Lillard and I love him with the Blazers. I don't take the idea of him not bailing for a superteam lightly. I think that's awesome. But that's not what he'd be doing here. At this point, Lillard is the only play the Blazers have to bring back real assets that can fuel a true rebuild.
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BigGameDamian said:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/clutch...eted-in-portlands-trade-talks-with-kings/amp/

RUMOR: The former lottery pick targeted in Blazers’ trade talks with Kings

“The Trail Blazers and Kings held talks bout disgruntled young forward Marvin Bagley. Given the multi-season tension with Bagley, he’s another player whom it’s surprising hasn’t been dealt.”
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Pass. I don't really pay attention to the Kings but Bagley has never impressed me in the least.
 
One thing that could help the last trade toward the 'next' trade, is to move Bledsoe's contract. But since he is limited to a 1-for-1 deal, what could you conceivably get for him? Another deal might be made to balance out his trade, but on it's own, he can only be traded for one other player along with picks...which we don't really have.

So who is in his range? You can get someone from around interestingly from a team standpoint, Jonas Valanciunas ($14,000,000) to interestingly player wise, Julius Randle ($21,780,000). In between are some of the following.

Tim Hardaway Jr
Danilo Gallinari
Harrison Barnes
Jeremi Grant
Jarrett Allen
Domantis Sabonis
Goran Dragic
Bojan Bogdanovic
Eric Gordon
Miles Turner
Terry Rozier
Ricky Rubio
Caris LeVert
Jonathon Isaac
Markelle Fultz
OG Anunoby
Marcus Morris
Marcus Smart
Thaddeus Young

A few of these names have been mentioned in other discussions, and perhaps with another deal, a couple of these might be available for various reasons. As long as Bledsoe's contract doesn't go the way of RLEC.
 
TBpup said:
One thing that could help the last trade toward the 'next' trade, is to move Bledsoe's contract. But since he is limited to a 1-for-1 deal, what could you conceivably get for him? Another deal might be made to balance out his trade, but on it's own, he can only be traded for one other player along with picks...which we don't really have.

So who is in his range? You can get someone from around interestingly from a team standpoint, Jonas Valanciunas ($14,000,000) to interestingly player wise, Julius Randle ($21,780,000). In between are some of the following.

Tim Hardaway Jr
Danilo Gallinari
Harrison Barnes
Jeremi Grant
Jarrett Allen
Domantis Sabonis
Goran Dragic
Bojan Bogdanovic
Eric Gordon
Miles Turner
Terry Rozier
Ricky Rubio
Caris LeVert
Jonathon Isaac
Markelle Fultz
OG Anunoby
Marcus Morris
Marcus Smart
Thaddeus Young

A few of these names have been mentioned in other discussions, and perhaps with another deal, a couple of these might be available for various reasons. As long as Bledsoe's contract doesn't go the way of RLEC.
Click to expand...
I would like Grant, Barnes or Sabonis. But, I don't see why the Clippers wouldn't have just done that themselves.

I would imagine picks would need to go to those teams too. And we lost two of our best assets at potentially getting a 1st back. So :dunno:
 
SlyPokerCat said:
I would like Grant, Barnes or Sabonis. But, I don't see why the Clippers wouldn't have just done that themselves.

I would imagine picks would need to go to those teams too. And we lost two of our best assets at potentially getting a 1st back. So :dunno:
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Exactly why it was so disappointing to get what little they did when those pieces would have been much more useful to use in acquiring actual talent. The rush to get below the Lux Tax is ownership malpractice. Could have been done so many other ways. If Cronin can pull a rabbit out of the hat with Bled's contract, outstanding. It is certainly needed.
 
Technically, teams trade contracts, not players.

On the official trade call with the league office, the NBA’s lawyer specifies that the contract of the player is being traded, then reads out some of the details of that contract for all parties. (Both sides, of course, are deeply familiar with said contract by this point.) Afterward, the actual trade memo from the league will say something to the effect of “Memphis trades the contract of Player X to New York for the contract of Player Y.”

This is an important distinction because it helps you to understand two apparently conflicting factors from the past week:

  1. Norman Powell is a better player than Caris LeVert.
  2. Trading Norman Powell returned less capital than trading Caris Levert.
In the wake of Sunday’s reported deal that would send Ricky Rubio, Cleveland’s 2022 first-round pick, a second-round pick swap and a future second to Indiana for LeVert, two fan bases in particular have questions.

Cavs fans, after slapping their foreheads that they just pushed their chips in a year after going 22-50, wonder why they traded for LeVert rather than Powell if Powell would have cost less and is better. Meanwhile, Blazers fans are asking why they got less for Powell than Indy did for LeVert if Powell is better.

Again, trades aren’t technically about players. As a noted Danish hooper named Hamlet* once said: “The contract’s the thing.” For Cleveland, there is a very important distinction between the contract of Powell and the contract of LeVert: Powell is signed for four years beyond this one, at increasing money, until he makes $20.5 million in 2025-26 at the age of 32.

(*Editor’s note: Hamlet wasn’t a real person and did not play basketball.)

Is Powell’s contract so bad? In the eyes of some teams, those out years are a liability. Fans and observers are generally too optimistic about the aging curve (“Look, Jeff Green is still playing!”) because of the availability bias — they remember the ones who stayed in the league and forget the great number of players who hit a wall and went splat in their late 20s and early 30s. Hey, remember when Greg Monroe got a max free-agent deal? He just signed a 10-day this past week. He’s 31.

Powell is a valuable offensive player right now and may defy the odds, but Portland also overreached on the years when re-signing him this past summer; there’s a reason teams weren’t falling all over themselves to get that contract.

LeVert, meanwhile, is signed for just this year and next. That seems almost toobrief, right? But the issue here is the convenient fact that LeVert’s and Kevin Love’s contracts both expire in the summer of 2023. Because of that, the Cavs retain an opportunity to add a max-ish contract with cap space before Evan Mobley is due for an extension, even with Jarrett Allen signed for $20 million a year and Darius Garland presumably getting a big chunk of change this coming summer.

Maybe it doesn’t come to fruition — Cleveland has struggled to lure free agents who weren’t locally born generational talents — but the doorway is still open. (Speaking of which: Did you know who is a free agent in 2023? I’ll just step aside here while you burn down the comments section.)

Back in the real world, LeVert also fits Cleveland’s roster better than Powell, for the simple reason that he is much more of a threat on the ball. With Rubio and Collin Sexton out for the season, the Cavs desperately needed somebody, anybody, who could make a play on the perimeter and get the ball to their dominant bigs.

This became particularly glaring any time Garland checked out; since Rubio’s season-ending ACL injury, the Cavs score 111.8 points per 100 possessions with Garland on the court and 103.0 with him off. Those numbers were even with J.B. Bickerstaff setting his rotation so that the Kevin Love pick-and-pop renaissance tour could prop up Cleveland’s wobbly bench units.

So now, problem solved … sort of. The downside is that Cleveland needed an initiator in the worst way … and LeVert is an initiator in the worst way. This is the part where Cavs fans might more justifiably get into the weeds on whether the assets given up were worth it. LeVert is an iffy-at-best defender, a subpar shooter (33.4 percent career) and, shall we say, a rather reluctant ball mover. Love’s pick-and-pops may turn into pick-and-watches.

However, LeVert is undeniably a player who can generate a ton of halfway decent shots for a team that has trouble with shot creation. His value as a floor raiser for Cleveland’s second units could be significant, not to mention as a closer with the starters — especially in the playoffs when opponents likely will go kitchen sink on Garland. On-ball shot creation, incidentally, is the thing Powell can’t do, so one can argue for LeVert’s fit here much more forcefully than one could with the Clippers.

LeVert’s contract, which is only $300,000 less than Rubio’s, has no tangible impact this year. (Speaking of which, Cleveland also gets a $300,000 trade exception. Don’t spend it all in one place, fellas.) LeVert’s contract adds $18.9 million next year, which is more than he’s worth, but the Cavs were $40 million below next year’s projected tax line.

LeVert being signed for next year also adds another layer to the Cavs’ offseason. Cleveland now has both enough wiggle room left to re-sign Sexton to a fair deal and stay below the tax … and enough of a backup plan to let him walk if the numbers get too high. With 12 players already signed for next year, Cleveland could feel pretty good about using its non-taxpayer midlevel exception on another guard, adding a cheap veteran wing, and calling it a day.

So, the last thing left to talk about is the assets surrendered. One can argue Cleveland overpaid here: The Cavs gave up their own first-round pick (likely to land in the low 20s), swapped Houston’s 2022 second for Miami’s (likely moving down 20 or more spots, from the low 30s to the mid-50s) and gave up Utah’s 2027 second-rounder.

The first-round pick here seems fairly equivalent in value to the player surrendered by the Clippers in the Powell trade (Keon Johnson), albeit with much greater flexibility since it hasn’t been used yet — picks decline in value once they’re driven off the lot.

However, normally that Houston pick would be a pretty valuable thing to throw in on top of the first-round pick they already surrendered — by itself, it’s an almost-first-rounder. On strict book value, Cleveland almost certainly overpaid.

Here’s where we get to another interesting twist that I’m wondering about as we get closer to June: There is a growing consensus that this draft stinks. There are four players everyone really likes, and after that a morass of guesswork and kinda-maybe guys. Who knows, maybe it’s the evaluators who are wrong and everything turns out fine. But nobody is comparing this crop to 2018’s haul, let’s put it that way.

Thus, the overall takeaway from Cleveland’s end is that it probably overpaid a bit to get an imperfect player, but one whose contract and roster fit was pretty close to ideal for their situation.
https://theathletic.com/3114987/202...man-powell-deals-its-all-about-the-contracts/
 
Scalma said:
Technically, teams trade contracts, not players.

On the official trade call with the league office, the NBA’s lawyer specifies that the contract of the player is being traded, then reads out some of the details of that contract for all parties. (Both sides, of course, are deeply familiar with said contract by this point.) Afterward, the actual trade memo from the league will say something to the effect of “Memphis trades the contract of Player X to New York for the contract of Player Y.”

This is an important distinction because it helps you to understand two apparently conflicting factors from the past week:

  1. Norman Powell is a better player than Caris LeVert.
  2. Trading Norman Powell returned less capital than trading Caris Levert.
In the wake of Sunday’s reported deal that would send Ricky Rubio, Cleveland’s 2022 first-round pick, a second-round pick swap and a future second to Indiana for LeVert, two fan bases in particular have questions.

Cavs fans, after slapping their foreheads that they just pushed their chips in a year after going 22-50, wonder why they traded for LeVert rather than Powell if Powell would have cost less and is better. Meanwhile, Blazers fans are asking why they got less for Powell than Indy did for LeVert if Powell is better.

Again, trades aren’t technically about players. As a noted Danish hooper named Hamlet* once said: “The contract’s the thing.” For Cleveland, there is a very important distinction between the contract of Powell and the contract of LeVert: Powell is signed for four years beyond this one, at increasing money, until he makes $20.5 million in 2025-26 at the age of 32.

(*Editor’s note: Hamlet wasn’t a real person and did not play basketball.)

Is Powell’s contract so bad? In the eyes of some teams, those out years are a liability. Fans and observers are generally too optimistic about the aging curve (“Look, Jeff Green is still playing!”) because of the availability bias — they remember the ones who stayed in the league and forget the great number of players who hit a wall and went splat in their late 20s and early 30s. Hey, remember when Greg Monroe got a max free-agent deal? He just signed a 10-day this past week. He’s 31.

Powell is a valuable offensive player right now and may defy the odds, but Portland also overreached on the years when re-signing him this past summer; there’s a reason teams weren’t falling all over themselves to get that contract.

LeVert, meanwhile, is signed for just this year and next. That seems almost toobrief, right? But the issue here is the convenient fact that LeVert’s and Kevin Love’s contracts both expire in the summer of 2023. Because of that, the Cavs retain an opportunity to add a max-ish contract with cap space before Evan Mobley is due for an extension, even with Jarrett Allen signed for $20 million a year and Darius Garland presumably getting a big chunk of change this coming summer.

Maybe it doesn’t come to fruition — Cleveland has struggled to lure free agents who weren’t locally born generational talents — but the doorway is still open. (Speaking of which: Did you know who is a free agent in 2023? I’ll just step aside here while you burn down the comments section.)

Back in the real world, LeVert also fits Cleveland’s roster better than Powell, for the simple reason that he is much more of a threat on the ball. With Rubio and Collin Sexton out for the season, the Cavs desperately needed somebody, anybody, who could make a play on the perimeter and get the ball to their dominant bigs.

This became particularly glaring any time Garland checked out; since Rubio’s season-ending ACL injury, the Cavs score 111.8 points per 100 possessions with Garland on the court and 103.0 with him off. Those numbers were even with J.B. Bickerstaff setting his rotation so that the Kevin Love pick-and-pop renaissance tour could prop up Cleveland’s wobbly bench units.

So now, problem solved … sort of. The downside is that Cleveland needed an initiator in the worst way … and LeVert is an initiator in the worst way. This is the part where Cavs fans might more justifiably get into the weeds on whether the assets given up were worth it. LeVert is an iffy-at-best defender, a subpar shooter (33.4 percent career) and, shall we say, a rather reluctant ball mover. Love’s pick-and-pops may turn into pick-and-watches.

However, LeVert is undeniably a player who can generate a ton of halfway decent shots for a team that has trouble with shot creation. His value as a floor raiser for Cleveland’s second units could be significant, not to mention as a closer with the starters — especially in the playoffs when opponents likely will go kitchen sink on Garland. On-ball shot creation, incidentally, is the thing Powell can’t do, so one can argue for LeVert’s fit here much more forcefully than one could with the Clippers.

LeVert’s contract, which is only $300,000 less than Rubio’s, has no tangible impact this year. (Speaking of which, Cleveland also gets a $300,000 trade exception. Don’t spend it all in one place, fellas.) LeVert’s contract adds $18.9 million next year, which is more than he’s worth, but the Cavs were $40 million below next year’s projected tax line.

LeVert being signed for next year also adds another layer to the Cavs’ offseason. Cleveland now has both enough wiggle room left to re-sign Sexton to a fair deal and stay below the tax … and enough of a backup plan to let him walk if the numbers get too high. With 12 players already signed for next year, Cleveland could feel pretty good about using its non-taxpayer midlevel exception on another guard, adding a cheap veteran wing, and calling it a day.

So, the last thing left to talk about is the assets surrendered. One can argue Cleveland overpaid here: The Cavs gave up their own first-round pick (likely to land in the low 20s), swapped Houston’s 2022 second for Miami’s (likely moving down 20 or more spots, from the low 30s to the mid-50s) and gave up Utah’s 2027 second-rounder.

The first-round pick here seems fairly equivalent in value to the player surrendered by the Clippers in the Powell trade (Keon Johnson), albeit with much greater flexibility since it hasn’t been used yet — picks decline in value once they’re driven off the lot.

However, normally that Houston pick would be a pretty valuable thing to throw in on top of the first-round pick they already surrendered — by itself, it’s an almost-first-rounder. On strict book value, Cleveland almost certainly overpaid.

Here’s where we get to another interesting twist that I’m wondering about as we get closer to June: There is a growing consensus that this draft stinks. There are four players everyone really likes, and after that a morass of guesswork and kinda-maybe guys. Who knows, maybe it’s the evaluators who are wrong and everything turns out fine. But nobody is comparing this crop to 2018’s haul, let’s put it that way.

Thus, the overall takeaway from Cleveland’s end is that it probably overpaid a bit to get an imperfect player, but one whose contract and roster fit was pretty close to ideal for their situation.
https://theathletic.com/3114987/202...man-powell-deals-its-all-about-the-contracts/
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I'll add one thing, POR is in the perfect position to give Johnson a ton of minutes the rest of the year to see if he can show something. No pick in later 1st rd doesn't have warts, its a crapshoot. Frankly given our current situation I'd rather have that pick now and see what he might have and tank while we are doing it
 
Blazinaway said:
I'll add one thing, POR is in the perfect position to give Johnson a ton of minutes the rest of the year to see if he can show something. No pick in later 1st rd doesn't have warts, its a crapshoot. Frankly given our current situation I'd rather have that pick now and see what he might have and tank while we are doing it
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yeah I think the front office just valued Johnson more than anyone that could’ve theoretically been available for them in this years class. And if they’re only using a draft pick in a trade, the lottery pick they’re likely to receive has more value anyway.
 
Scalma said:
yeah I think the front office just valued Johnson more than anyone that could’ve theoretically been available for them in this years class. And if they’re only using a draft pick in a trade, the lottery pick they’re likely to receive has more value anyway.
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The lottery pick they're likely to receive can't be traded because of the pick owed to Chicago... until after they've already made the pick, that is. So in order to trade it, they'd have to pick the player, hold him until July, and then complete a deal after the moratorium. If they'd received another 2022 (or 2023) FRP in the Powell deal, they'd be able to trade either that or their own before the draft, without restrictions. That flexibility to make deals would arguably be more valuable than the pick itself.
 
PtldPlatypus said:
The lottery pick they're likely to receive can't be traded because of the pick owed to Chicago... until after they've already made the pick, that is. So in order to trade it, they'd have to pick the player, hold him until July, and then complete a deal after the moratorium. If they'd received another 2022 (or 2023) FRP in the Powell deal, they'd be able to trade either that or their own before the draft, without restrictions. That flexibility to make deals would arguably be more valuable than the pick itself.
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100%.

A 1st would have been so much more valuable than Keon Johnson.
 
PtldPlatypus said:
The lottery pick they're likely to receive can't be traded because of the pick owed to Chicago... until after they've already made the pick, that is. So in order to trade it, they'd have to pick the player, hold him until July, and then complete a deal after the moratorium. If they'd received another 2022 (or 2023) FRP in the Powell deal, they'd be able to trade either that or their own before the draft, without restrictions. That flexibility to make deals would arguably be more valuable than the pick itself.
Click to expand...

Dallas allegedly passed on a potential lottery pick for Finney Smith. I don’t think anyone values this class that much. I doubt teams are lining up for non lottery picks
 
Scalma said:
Dallas allegedly passed on a potential lottery pick for Finney Smith. I don’t think anyone values this class that much. I doubt teams are lining up for non lottery picks
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I don't see a lot of value in this draft, personally. The best player's upside is Chris Bosh. There are a few intriguing shooting guards but a lot of other guys with higher than normal bust potential. People thinking getting a high lottery pick is going to be a great, tradeable asset might discover that it's not if no one has any interest in acquiring it.
 
CJ McCollum is 30 and Normal Powell is 28. If GMs worry about a drop off at a certain age why didn't we keep Powell and dump CJ's huge salary for a bag of chips?
 
Norman Powell is the only small guard on the court for the Clippers and he's kicking some butt.
He's got 26 points on 14 shots. Reggie Jackson is 3-12 for 10 points.
 
blazerfan11 said:
CJ McCollum is 30 and Normal Powell is 28. If GMs worry about a drop off at a certain age why didn't we keep Powell and dump CJ's huge salary for a bag of chips?
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who says they won’t trade both?
 
blazerfan11 said:
Norman Powell is the only small guard on the court for the Clippers and he's kicking some butt.
He's got 26 points on 14 shots. Reggie Jackson is 3-12 for 10 points.
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Clippers lost by 24 I guess defense still not part of the game. Covington shot well too.
 
James lamphear said:
Clippers lost by 24 I guess defense still not part of the game. Covington shot well too.
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The Clippers were without their two best players. Nobody is saying Norm is a superstar. But he is a damn good 4th best player on a contending team.

He scored 28 points in 24 minutes. The loss isn't his fault.
 
TBpup said:
Every year there are players who can contribute....just have to find them.
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Well. yeah, if you're bad enough it's even easier to find guys to contribute. They just don't contribute to making your team a contender.
 
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