The Downside of reaching your Upside?

by Krang on Nov 14, 2009 11:45 AM PST

Is it too early for me to start obssesing about "problems" that might develop from The Blazers success? Is this just an interaction between Prilosec and daytime cold medicine? Yes probably but humor me a little if you would...

Batum, Webster, Outlaw, Fernandez-Miller, Blake, Bayless and Patty Mills...not to mention Pendergraph and Cuningham. On another continent, Claver, Freeland and Kopponen. It has been discussed and debated the concept that The Blazers need to make the fabled Consolidating Trade.

That's such a difficult thing. Do you give away multiple starting quality players for singular bench/role players? Do you trade great talent for equal great talent thus not solving the roster depth problem you assumingly are trying to address? Then it becomes an exercise in simply changing the names and the people in the uniforms.

Once upon a time this franchise was burned by trading a young Jermaine O'Neal away right before he blossomed into an All-Star. Since then, we've held onto young potential like everyone putting on a Blazers jersey was automatically headed towards greatness. For example, I think the best time to of traded Sergio Rodriguez would of been after his rookie year. Rumor had it many, many teams were highly interested. We kept him and all it caused was chemistry problems and a slow decline of Sergios value. But that's fine. That's okay. It happens. When you are dealing with young players and potential you have the Jermaine O' Neals, and the Sergio Rodriguez's and everything inbetween, and I don't think The Blazers have been any better or worse in handling these decisions than most teams. Create any revisionist history you would like where The Blazers keep a Jermaine O' Neal and he blossoms here in Portland, but who can really say our present would be any better or worse, or even the time period inwhich it happened would of been much better or worse? Go back through the mists of time and imagine a Blazer team that keeps a Walton and a Moses Malone? Waltons foot goes south? Hmm Lucas and Moses sounds like a viably championship core to me.

But sorry, I've gotten off track. My point being to those thinking we NEED a consolidating trade I ask you what if we are succesful from now through most of this season? Are we going to be petrified with the idea that we might make a move and destroy the chemistry? Is it going to be the conservative, if it isn't broke don't fix it approach? I'm really afraid that might be the case. If McMillan and Brandon can get this team to buy into the concept of T.E.A.M. , together everyone achieves more....then if we are succesful, it's going to be hard for KP to pull the trigger on any consolidating trade, or any trade.

So you are stuck. What are you in it for? Success is success. Could the real problem become the team buying into the team concept better than some of the fans buy into the team concept? Could we become so nervous or conservative about our team that we never ice the cake?

The Blazers seem to have excellent scouting and talent evaluators. But conversely I think The Blazers also have great confidence in the players we obtain, and that's good and bad. The Blazers sign players based on unseen or unreached potential, in the case of Batum, great. In the cases of Pendergraph and Patty Mills? Who knows? But it becomes difficult for a franchise to make a trade when every asset it obtains get's filed under "Potential Future All-Star or at least Starter". Maybe it's not suprising that fans do this, but what is a little suprising is it seems the franchise itself does this as well.

I'm forgiving, I'd rather error on the conservative side, but IMO we held onto Sergio for about a season too long. I have grown to hate the analogy, but it works so often. KP has shown that he was bold and skilled and maybe a little lucky in putting together the ingredients for The Blazer Cake. As this team evolves and progresses, the icing becomes more and more important. Do we need a certain cutthroat boldness eventually? Is KP willing to trade good maybe even potentially great players at some point? Or are we too afraid of losing a Fernandez and seeing him on another teams highlight reels? Or trading a Webster and seeing him blossom as a starter for someone else? Or a Batum becoming a future All-Star but not for The Blazers.

Or are those that demand a consolidating trade just totally wrong? Can we keep all the talent we have, and can we take that talent to the Championship level? Can The Blazers talent continue to be like a "Whack a Mole" game? Where you never know who's going to pop up on any given night and give The Blazers a lift to a win?

I kind of think eventually things settle down. I think eventually The Blazers need to make some decisions about our depth. PLEASE NOTE: I'm not even saying this needs to happen this season. But someday I fully expect to hear about the departure of a Blazer I like, a Blazer I think might have a great career but now for another team. That could be the downside of reaching your upside.

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Comments

I say trade players as soon as they reach their peak of trade value.....

Brandon is ready to go now. LA should be traded during the off-season. Greg can go the year after next. And so on and so on. We are going to need to make trades anyway, right?

The best players only try to, "do it all," themselves when it is a playoff necessity or, on occasion, to put on a show. There is no need to belabor the point!

by KINGofMACct on Nov 14, 2009 1:14 PM PST reply actions

This whole thread just got blown up

because an injury to travis proved why we value the depth and why consolidation puts in a case of needing to get lucky with injuries to be contenders at the end of the season

by lurtsman on Nov 14, 2009 8:43 PM PST up reply actions

If you trade players as soon as the become valuable,

then you significantly lower the chances of valuable players being injured.

The best players only try to, "do it all," themselves when it is a playoff necessity or, on occasion, to put on a show. There is no need to belabor the point!

by KINGofMACct on Nov 15, 2009 6:10 AM PST up reply actions

Ridiculous...

….if you really believe my post has anything to do with trading Brandon, LA or Oden then you didn’t spend much time reading it. I know you are being sarcastic, but the idea of a consolidating trade, I think, for most people doesn’t obviously involve trading away our core.

I really am posing these ideas as questions, because I’d like real feedback.

I posed most of this as a series of questions because I’m sincerely not sure how I feel about many of these ideas one way or another.

Watching The Blazers for litterally decades, albeit as a young child for the early years, my concern is that I’ve seen that deep teams with duality or homogenized level of talent often are capable of being very, very sucessful BUT usually IMO there is a limit to that success. If a championship is your goal, most often it’s the team with the best starting 5 and a good bench, over the team with the very good starting 5 and a very, very good bench. As I tried to illuminate in my post, I don’t think this is something that necessarily happens this season but I do think the future for The Blazers will require some moves. As much as fans would like to like this team and believe that everyone on this roster is potentially great and will someday become their favorite Blazer on the court, I still think there is a trade or trades in The Blazers future.

Most Championship teams have a pretty clear cut starting 5, and a pretty clear cut bench. I expect The Blazers to move in that direction.

Don’t get me wrong, I like KP, I like this franchise and the way it is run, but I do think if The Blazers have a weakness in management it is sometimes falling a little too much in love with our talent. Sometimes I think we need a more realistic evaluation of assets we do have, and I’m not talking about Brandon, LMA or Oden. We have transitioned the past few years from a team rebuilding to a team that is building. That isn’t just semantics, I think it changes the way you look at talent. A few years back, we were so talent depleted that we needed to hold on to young players with potential in hopes that they would emerge and become something we could use or build around. Now we have our core, now we have the talent to be at least a playoff team, if not a division challenger. Now we are talking about icing, and it’s just as important as the cake.

The news of Outlaws injury is going to make a lot of people say “See we can’t afford to make a consolidating trade”….but I don’t think it kills this issue. What it really boils down to is do you think this team can be “Championship” succesful with Miller, Blake, Bayless and Mills all trying for time at PG and Batum, Outlaw, Webster and Fernandez all trying for playing time? Because you don’t want injury to be your chemistry maker.

"Mother Nature started this fight, I think it's about time we ended it!"

by Krang on Nov 15, 2009 10:43 AM PST up reply actions

First of all I agree with you that this is not personal, this is about ideas.

Don’t get me wrong, I like KP, I like this franchise and the way it is run, but I do think if The Blazers have a weakness in management it is sometimes falling a little too much in love with our talent.

What is wrong with letting talented players develop and grow together? The team is getting better through maturation process. There is no need to force the issue to a breaking point in in attempting to win now so much that we will risk our future success (by unecessarily trading away talented players) in order to do it.

To a degree, your post and particularly that quote embodies the feeling of impatience and panic about it to me. Neither KP nor the Blazer management group would want to pass on a potential championship level trade, but I don’t think those come along every day. We tried to force things in the past during the Jailblazers days; I hope we learned the lesson that truly good things take time, patience, and hard work.

The best players only try to, "do it all," themselves when it is a playoff necessity or, on occasion, to put on a show. There is no need to belabor the point!

by KINGofMACct on Nov 15, 2009 11:54 PM PST up reply actions

Not totally wrong. Just mostly wrong.

Or are those that demand a consolidating trade just totally wrong?

"A bizarre and extremely rare hybrid Blazer/Laker fan, Timbo has always struggled to contain the Beast Within, like Dr. Jekyll, Bruce Banner, or Ted Kennedy." — Miled Animal

by timbo on Nov 14, 2009 1:54 PM PST reply actions

It's kind of like being mostly dead.

Now, if he were ALL dead, there’d be only one thing you can do.

Go through his pockets and look for loose change.

I know less than half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

by haildablazer on Nov 14, 2009 3:03 PM PST up reply actions

By the way, I'm not left handed and I'm looking for a six fingered man

And I do not believe that word means what you think it means…

I know less than half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

by haildablazer on Nov 14, 2009 3:04 PM PST up reply actions

mostly wrong!

by prof.mike on Nov 14, 2009 2:57 PM PST reply actions

There are two issues here: The development of the players and their trade value.

When you’re building a team, the smart way is to do so through the draft. Most of the players you draft nowadays are 19 years old, with one year of college play on their resume. Most of those guys are not prodigy-level talent where the team quickly recognizes a star in the making. They need time to learn the NBA game, adjust to life as a professional basketball player, and even to finish growing into their bodies. I imagine the most important criterion that the coach and GM uses to evaluate young players is some kind of development scale that shows how much they are progressing from season to season. Players that have the right attitude, are hard workers, and show improvement over time toward fulfilling their potential are keepers. Those that do not become trade bait.

You have to keep young players long enough to know what you have. Even those who show improvement don’t always improve on a straight line. You need to give them enough time to work through their plateaus. The team decides how much time that is. In the case of Jarrett Jack and Sergio Rodriguez, three years was long enough to see what they were going to become, and those judgments have proven sound.

It’s always tempting to look at players like that from the advantage of hindsight and complain that the team should have traded them earlier, but a philosopy like that is fool’s gold. Young players are cheap and have the potential to develop into solid players, even stars. If you let such players go too soon you are making your team weaker and other teams stronger. If the players prove to be unsatisfactory, you get what you can for them and it costs you only the difference between what you get for them at that point and what you potentially could have got for them had you traded them earlier. Using Sergio and Jarrett as examples, what do you think the Blazers could have got for them by trading them a year or two earlier? My guess is not much more than they did in fact get for them.

Another issue that applies to maturing teams like the Blazers is need. Given that we have few holes to fill, did we really need to get more than we got for Sergio and Jarrett? Jermaine and Moses are different situations. In each case, the team knew they would become stars yet felt compelled to trade them for financial or other reasons.

I am satsified that the Blazers have a good player development plan and are having good results with it.

by MiledAnimal on Nov 15, 2009 1:56 PM PST reply actions

Excellent points expalined well.

It is an acceptable risk to let players develop. Management has to have faith that they will, though good preliminary assessments, come up with a pretty good percentage of diamonds in the rough. Giving up on a player just in time for another team to get a gem is just plain foolish (unless you are getting the value added benefit of filling a major need that could not have been filled in another way).

The best players only try to, "do it all," themselves when it is a playoff necessity or, on occasion, to put on a show. There is no need to belabor the point!

by KINGofMACct on Nov 16, 2009 12:09 AM PST up reply actions

The case for consolidation broke two feet and tore a labrum.

That is the way for young, non-rotation players to show what they’ve got. They have talent, but none have the standing to complain about minutes because they’re young and unproven. If the lineup were made up of veterans, it would be a different story, but all of this hand-wringing about too much depth with these guys is overblown.

by Benjamanic on Nov 16, 2009 1:40 PM PST reply actions