Lowe Suggests Possible Deadline Deals for Blazers

The NBA trade deadline is just over two weeks away and rumors are rife across the league. With that in mind, ESPN’s Zach Lowe invited The Ringer’s frontman Bill Simmons onto his podcast this week to discuss said rumors as well as their own suggested moves as the March 25 free-for-all approaches.

Lowe highlighted the Portland Trail Blazers’ limited assets and potential targets, including the Magic’s Aaron Gordon, Kings forward Harrison Barnes and Spurs wing Demar DeRozan.

“I think Portland, now they’ve been hurt by the fact that Zach Collins’ trade value is a complete mystery-maybe nothing, Rodney Hood maybe nothing.”

“But between Nassir Little, who is playing pretty well for them and Simons, who just won the dunk contest and has been playing decently since CJ McCollum got hurt, they can put some stuff together even though they are encumbered having traded a pick for RoCo.”

“They’ve been my favorite Aaron Gordon team forever, I don’t know if they have the goods to get that done but like why wouldn’t they sniff around Harrison Barnes, even DeRozan. But then you come into the fact that like with Lillard, DeRozan and McCollum that doesn’t quite work.”

Simmons didn’t add any suggestions of his own but commented on Carmelo Anthony’s expanded role with the team, using an interesting analogy.

“If Portland was a movie, the amount of scenes Carmelo is in would be alarming to the director and the producers.”

“I’m just saying is Carmelo one of our stars of this movie, I thought we just hired him to do a couple of scenes.”

The Portland discussion starts at the 49-minute mark. Listen to the full podscast here.