For teams calling about trading for Damian Lillard the message from the Portland Trail Blazers has been unambiguous: Bring your best offer and make your team our preferred trade destination. General manager Joe Cronin doesn't plan to operate a transfer portal to the Miami Heat and dutifully deliver history's greatest Blazer to his targeted team.
Ownership plans to honor Lillard's request for a trade but Blazers officials are telling teams they'll move Lillard for only the deepest return of assets available. Portland is pursuing the sliding scale superstar package of desirable draft picks and high-level young players. For the summer, Cronin's betting the market over Miami.
As he executes the exit of the greatest player in franchise history, executives talking to Cronin describe him as devoid of sentiment. Business for Lillard, business for the Blazers.
Insightful by Adrian Wojnarowski. He’s getting his intel not from Cronin’s propaganda but from other team execs who have talked to Cronin. And this is a script flip.
•This is going to last all summer.
•Other teams are not being looked at not as facilitators for Miami but as destinations for Lillard. “Make your team our preferred destination”.
•”Devoid of sentiment.” “Business”: for Portland and for Lillard. “Betting the market over Miami.”
I believe Woj’s report is totally accurate when it comes to Cronin. Which is not the same thing as saying it is accurate by Cronin. In fact the opposite. This is not business for Lillard; Dame’s not holding out for more money (business), he wants to win a championship (aspirational) and play with his friends (emotional). Lillard is doing similar to what LeBron James did in 2010 when he took less money to take his talents to South Beach for a better chance of winning a title.
Similar but not identical. LeBron was a free agent; Dame is on a long-term contract without a no-trade clause. Dame’s leverage, to the extent that he has leverage, is psychological. You don’t want a moping guy who you’re paying $50M/year to mope. There though Lillard’s consummate professionalism and integrity work at counter-purposes to his desiderata. He’s not James Harden, not Kyrie Irving nor Ben Simmons. Those ghouls who haunt team execs and worry Adam Silver do not seem to have a fellow traveler in Damian Lillard. Lillard's agent is trying to change that perception: He's calling other team execs and telling them not to make a serious move for his client or they will end up with Mope City from Rip City. Knowing nothing other than what I read by others I nonetheless am quite comfortable opining that Lillard's adamant destination of choice will depress the market for him: once burned, twice shy.
Which brings me back to the foundational misread here: It's not business to Lillard. Cronin is 100% wrong, imo. Cronin misreads, and he does not have quite the leverage he thinks he does. He threw away 100% leverage when he 1) didn't trade his draft pick for a whale that could swim in championship seas with Dame 2) didn't sign a free agent whale 3) didn’t trade Lillard at the trade deadline during the season 4) says now he would move Damian to the highest bidder--not keep him. All of which showed a) that Cronin did not think Portland could win a championship with Lillard b) thereby depressed the market for all those save Miami who do think he is the missing link c) showed Lillard that he was not valued as a championship key piece, and d) led to Lillard asking for a trade. Cronin could have said, as Philadelphia said re Electric Maxey, "We're not trading Dame.” Teams do that all the time. "No, and hell no. He's under contract to us." That feeds the haunting fear of trading for an unhappy player. "Why didn't you say 'No, hell no', Joe? Because you don't think you can win with Dame and don't want an unhappy player who you will have to pay $63,228,828 in 2026/27 when he is 36?" Cronin removed Portland from the market for Lillard. That's counter-indicated as a business decision.
Power is not symmetrical here, Portland has more of it, but it would behoove both Lillard and Portland to fully internalize that power here is not unipolar. Lillard has some power and Cronin has thrown away some power. If the power calculus is done accurately there is one alternative to Miami that I think would work, Brooklyn. Great owner, great city, a slew of those alluring Door # 3's that hide all blemishes to which deep thinkers are pulled, is not implausible as a title contender, and which has one of Dame's "dawgs", Mikal Bridges. I don't think Damian Lillard would brown out in Rust, mope. I think he would be happy there.
Cronin is committed to extending this through the summer. That is another poor business strategy. As the days and weeks pass emotion increases, "devoid of sentiment" wanes. Both sides will get angry and Cronin will unload Lillard for less than he could get for him now, which is less than he will get for him tomorrow. It's linear not exponential but drip, drip, drip, it drips away.
