MAILBAG: Who are the Trail Blazers Most Likely to Trade Before the Deadline?
Plus, what is the market for Anfernee Simons and Deandre Ayton?
This is the final of three installments of this week’s Trail Blazers mailbag—thanks again to all of you for the great questions.
You can read the first two parts below, if you missed them.
Sean Highkin
Sean Highkin
I try to loosely group these questions together when multiple of them hit on similar topics. The ones I have for you in the final part today largely cover trade buzz, or lack thereof.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Which Blazer is the most likely to be traded this season?
- Paul O.
Jerami Grant. He’s the one that checks two important boxes:
- He’s definitely not a long-term building block here, being so much older than everyone else in the rotation.
- Despite his contract, he’s good enough and productive enough to have a real market at the deadline, meaning they won’t be trading him just to trade him, at neutral or negative value.
I’ll get much more into this as we get closer to Dec. 15, the unofficial start of “trade season,” but every one of their other tradable veterans has a question mark of some kind. Grant doesn’t. He’s a known quantity, he’s the kind of player that can help a lot of teams, and his salary, while high for what the Blazers are trying to build, isn’t out of line with his production, especially with all the new TV money coming in starting next season.
Hi Sean,
I've gone from not worrying a whole lot about trading the obvious candidates (although do agree we clearly should've moved Simons over the summer) to now being concerned we might be just a shade too good to guarantee the bottom four lottery odds. Plus we need to unblock Delano and Clingan for more minutes now? What's your take on making moves quickly to keep the tank momentum vs. the obvious developmental value of having experienced players on the team?
- Matthew B
The problem is you can’t just push a button to “make moves quickly” in real life like you can in 2K. There’s a reason that once the season starts, you don’t usually see a lot of trades happen until closer to the deadline. The teams that might be “buyers” before February (i.e. the teams that would be interested in Grant or Anfernee Simons) want to take the first part of the season to see what they have and what they need, and how much they’re willing to give up to fill those needs.
And if you’re a team in the Blazers’ position, unless one of your players is an actively harmful presence in the locker room (which none of their guys are), you don’t want to trade someone just for the sake of “doing something” or getting a guy off the team to clear the runway for somebody else that you don’t even know is good or not. It matters what you get back and whether that makes sense.
The deal this front-office regime has made that’s aged the worst, in terms of value they got back, is the Norm Powell/Robert Covington trade to the Clippers at the 2022 deadline, and they did that essentially just to get off the salary and make the team worse to pursue a lottery pick. Everyone killed them for that trade, and for making it as early before the deadline as they did. When you’re driven by a need to “make moves quickly to keep the tank momentum,” that tends to be the result, and that’s not what you want.
The types of deals they’d feel comfortable making won’t be on the table until closer to February.
Do you think the Blazers will do something to make sure they end up with a bottom four record, or is the expectation that will happen naturally?
- Jackson N.
They’ll be fine. You’re already starting to see the injuries pile up, which isn’t what they want, but isn’t going to hurt the lottery odds. Once they trade away one or more of the veterans at the deadline, they’ll get worse. As it stands, even with the unlikely three-game winning streak and the win in Houston, they have the fourth-worst point differential in the league. There are a lot of teams vying for a bottom-four record, so I can’t guarantee you that the Blazers will get there, but they’ll be in the mix. You don’t have to worry about them accidentally competing for the play-in.
Does this latest stretch of play without them show the front office that the team *should* move Ant and/or Ayton - for play style, development, chemistry or other - more imminently? If so, who is more likely moved?
It seems both would be pretty difficult to move but it’s hard to deny the team is playing better and differently without them, albeit over a short stretch, but seemingly confirming many fans’ suspicion that the team “just works” better without them, plus drumming up excitement for more activity that feels somewhat inevitable.
- Trevor S.
If you made me guess, I think Simons is the more likely to be moved before February, simply because there’s less salary to match (he makes around $8 million less than Ayton). I definitely agree that it makes sense to move both of them, eventually. I just don’t know whether that happens before the deadline or in the summer.
What are the legitimate teams that would even consider 1) a trade for Ant and 2) for Ayton?
It seems like given size/defense, the market for Ant is relatively small and due to the contract for DA, that is relatively small as well
- Eric W.
It’s too early right now to pinpoint specific teams interested in those two players. I don’t think either one will have nearly as strong a market as Grant does, but the Blazers have gotten calls on both players and will continue to. How serious any of those calls are remains to be seen. In both cases—particularly Ayton—it might be easier to move them in the offseason than in-season. There’s no guarantee either one gets traded before February, but it’s not impossible.
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