I’m sure this I not what most Blazer fans expected or even wanted. While the Diogu for Ruffin trade looks minor, it does provide the Blazers with a $3 million trade exception. This can be used to take back other teams players or draft picks without sending anything back. The last time Portland had a trade exception they received James Jones and a draft pick from Phoenix. The pick resulted in Rudy Fernandez, so yes these can be very useful. Yesterday on 1080 the Fan, Kevin Prichard was asked if he was going to get a first round pick with the exception, he laughed and then said, and I’m paraphrasing here, if there is a pick we want we will get it. The only reason this deal was done was for the exception Ruffin won’t play this year, if anything he will be waived. This also lowers the Blazers payroll by about 2 million which would save a dollar for dollar penalty in luxury tax. It also helps them out this summer, because Ike is a restricted free agent and the Blazers would have a hold placed on their cap until they signed him or released the option, which would have dug into their free agent money.
Now on to the bigger news of the trade deadline, this was the lack of a significant trade by the Blazers. I feel that the team had a real opportunity to become much better for now and in the future. I think they could have made a move that would cement them in the top 4 of the West and give them a hell of a shot at winning their division. Now would they have had to give up some young players, most likely yes. But here is the problem with young talent, you don’t know for sure what you have. We could have traded possibility for actuality.
Now yes they do get ride of Raef’s contract this summer and that should give them about $6 million to play with including Ike’s money. Now since they are below the cap they can trade for a player that would put them over by that much. So you could get a $10 million player by trading a $4 million player. KP’s thoughts on this basically boil down to the economy. He believes that most teams this summer will not be able to sign/afford players as they have in the past, so the Blazers can get players for cheaper than normal. This is all well and good but in that case you are limited to the free agents out there.
So in short I’m disappointed that the Blazers did not add a big time scorer, this team needs one more. However I still think KP will get something good down the road, but I’m not convinced it will be better than what we could have had.
Read the rest of this post...
