I'd like to take a short break from a longer post I'm working on for tomorrow to briefly shoot down the Stephen Curry talk.
Curry makes all sorts of sense for the Blazers... last year. I'm sure KP loves Curry's game, loves his family background and loves his personality. KP probably sees Curry as an undervalued asset and I wouldn't be surprised at all if Curry was very high on KP's board this year.
But as many of you have pointed out, Curry and Jerryd Bayless overlap. They overlap a lot; Curry is essentially Jerryd Bayless minus the creatine and with a more proven stroke.
I probably sound like a broken record but it bears repeating whenever these rumors pop up: If anyone is higher on Bayless than me, it's KP. KP was a tough, kind of awkward interview... he left me fumbling with his non-answers and maybe wasn't in the best of moods that morning. But for the 3 or 4 minutes we talked Bayless it was like Cheech and Chong talking herb: unashamedly enthusiastic.
I believe Bayless would be #2 on Kevin Pritchard's draft board this year. No lower than #3. I can make an argument that Rubio might be in that #2 spot as well but I can't make a definitive argument for anyone else given Pritchard's statements about how high Bayless ranked on his board last year and the relative quality of that draft compared to this one.
So if KP is really going to part with Bayless, he does it in a package for a big, big name, probably a veteran. You can't trade him for any draft pick except Griffin and probably Rubio. Neither one of those guys is realistically available to the Blazers, short of a blockbuster trade, because the teams drafting in that spot are going to want a lot more than Bayless for their pick. That's how it goes.
So to land Curry, what you would have to see is 2 trades: one to send Bayless out for a big name to make it worth it to KP and another to land a spot in the back half of the lottery to draft Curry.
(You could perhaps find a team in the back half of the lottery that also had a big name that intrigued you but if you're taking both of those assets off of them you're going to be giving up even more in return. Does that sound like the kind of "roster tweaking" Pritchard has talked about recently? Or does that sound more like an overhaul? More to the point: do you really want to swap parts with a lottery team?)
Complicating the matter even further, Steve Blake just had shoulder surgery so he's almost certainly locked in to the Blazers through the draft. Teams simply don't like to trade for damaged goods. Can the Blazers really make two big draft day trades without including Blake? Not impossible. But very unlikely.
A way more likely scenario: Pritchard simply drafts Lawson, particularly if reports of his freefall are to be believed and he's available at 24. What makes more sense: complement the backup point guard you believe is the #2 or #3 talent in this year's draft with another point guard that possesses a different skill set, or give up on and trade away that highly valued point guard to bring back a similar point guard, likely at significant cost to your current roster?
To boil it down: Getting Steph Curry probably doesn't happen without 2 trades and significant roster turnover. Barring a major freefall on draft night (all the way out of the lottery), getting Steph Curry simply doesn't happen.
-- Ben (benjamin.golliver@gmail.com)