General Manager Joe Cronin of the Portland Trail Blazers is under pressure from a large segment of the team\u2019s fan base to swap out the old-timers on the team in favor of draft picks and\/or younger contributors. And Joe, do it before the NBA\u2019s February 5 trade deadline, thank you very much.<\/p>\n
Part of the impetus for this pressure is the rise of Deni Avdija, who is becoming a high-end NBA player right before our eyes. How high is hard to say, but it\u2019s pretty danged far up there and seems to be getting higher every day. Some say he\u2019s the leading candidate for Most Improved Player in the league this year. You won\u2019t hear many challenges to that assertion coming from Rip City. So anyone calling the next iteration of the Blazers \u201cDeni\u2019s Team\u201d has a lot of ammo for that argument, the corollary to which is anyone not on \u201cDeni\u2019s timeline\u201d needs to get out of the way.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, Blazers icon Damian Lillard is looming on the near horizon like a ghost of Christmas past. It\u2019s pretty hard to envision a better example of a player \u201cnot on Deni\u2019s timeline\u201d than Dame, who is obviously much closer to the end of his career than the beginning. But he apparently has the right to refuse a trade, so he\u2019s going nowhere. Which raises an obvious question: what the heck is Dame doing here?<\/p>\n
For starters, let\u2019s kick the conventional wisdom to the curb. The idea that Dame is here as a sentimental gesture to his Trail Blazers legacy is ludicrous, even if that\u2019s what Joe Cronin had in mind when he made this move (reader alert: I have no insider information whatsoever). But let\u2019s get real for a moment: \u201cI\u2019m toast, so just put me in the corner for old time\u2019s sake and I\u2019ll try to make a three now and then\u201d are words that will never be spoken by the Damian Lillard we know and love. Instead, he\u2019s going to roll into training camp next fall with his hair on fire and a chip a mile high on his shoulder.<\/p>\n
How do I know this? The same way we all do! Every time someone says Dame will never be close to the same player he was before his Achilles injury, his internal fire burns several degrees hotter. No one knows how much he will actually be able to do when he hits the hardwood again, but everyone knows he\u2019ll try to move heaven and earth to prove every naysayer wrong.<\/p>\n
This point is important to remember because it makes the option of going all-in on \u201cDeni\u2019s Team\u201d virtually impossible right now. Dame will be here fighting to reclaim his perch near the top of the NBA totem pole, which means the chances that the team he is on will be thought of as \u201cDeni\u2019s Team\u201d are about the same as Dame\u2019s uniform number: 0. Oh, wait, that was the letter O. How soon we forget!<\/p>\n
Fortunately, there is another path forward. What if we turn this situation upside down and ask if Deni and the young core already forming around him fit Dame\u2019s timeline? Judging by what the youngsters are doing on their own right now, I\u2019d say the answer is yes, as long as we keep the other old-timers. Not so sure? Consider for a minute what \u201cDeni\u2019s Team\u201d seems to lack: an experienced point guard, reliable shooting from distance and high-impact bench play. If you add Dame, Jrue Holiday and Jerami Grant to the equation, which of the problems listed above are still looking for a solution?<\/p>\n
This obviously requires the return of good health to several people, Dame in particular, which may or may not be possible. But this is the tricky part: it says here that Dame\u2019s journey will dominate the next Trail Blazers season no matter where the journey ends. Why? It\u2019s almost too simple to say: Dame is going to consume most of the oxygen in these parts just like he has since Day One, because no one who has been following the Damian Lillard story this far is likely to skip the final chapter!<\/p>\n
So what say you, Blazers faithful! Can we let \u201cDame\u2019s Team\u201d cook for a season before we ship the old folks off? Drop your answer in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"General Manager Joe Cronin of the Portland Trail Blazers is under pressure from a large segment of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537051,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3784],"tags":[7,601,37790,6,687,471,63976,3967,1617],"class_list":{"0":"post-537050","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-portland-trail-blazers","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-blazers","10":"tag-blazers-gameday-coverage","11":"tag-nba","12":"tag-portland","13":"tag-portland-trail-blazers","14":"tag-portland-trail-blazers-discussion","15":"tag-portlandtrailblazers","16":"tag-trail-blazers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115896012336485821","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}