2024-25 Team Developments: Trades / Free Agents / News / Rumors / Ideas

No.that is not the record at all. Shams wrote an entire article on it. They presented Rob with 3 options. Dame, Derozan or Russ. Rob passed on Dame. Washington declined the Russ trade at first. Whatever happened with Demar remains a mystery. THEN Rob was going to trade for Buddy Hield. That's when Westbrook asked the owner to let him go to the Lakers.

Rob is the GM, he can do whatever he wants. You continue to make excuses for him for some reason. Nothing is ever really his fault. It's Lebron, it's Kurt or Linda, it's Jeanie.

Hell when it was Magic in charge...damn all that...everything was all Magic...period.

 

rob didn't pass on dame. dame wasn't available. i think you're forgetting a) dame's status at the time and b) portland's utter unwillingness to trade him, particularly to us. this would be like lebron saying today that one option for rob is to trade for SGA.

as you said, derozan was mysterious, as there wasn't an obvious path for him to get to la, yet he claims he was coming here. no idea how/why he believed that. would i have chosen him over hield? probably. but again, as i recall, i didn't understand how it was going to happen, as i believe it was a S&T that involved san antonio playing ball.

so rob went to get his boy buddy, then got westbrook foist upon him by all three guys (lebron, AD, russ). what's he supposed to do at that point? i guess overrule them, but i get why he didn't. at least he learned his lesson and stopped listening to lebron and AD after that.

 

Portland sure traded Dame didn't they. We never made an offer. Just like we never made an offer, for Turner or Kyrie.

Washington declined the Westbrook trade first. So no...Westbrook wasn't just foisted on him at the last minute. He pushed that trade first and got rebuffed.

He should be listening to somebody, cause most of his moves have been mediocre. Thank God Westbrook pulled his ear on Rui, and Luka fell into our lap.

 

separate topic--the asymmetry in media coverage on jokic/doncic continues to amaze me. barkley's waxing poetic about jokic's big game after the loss (and after a couple pretty meh games by jokic leading up to this one). meanwhile, i'm re-watching the dagger from SGA, where okc just keeps resetting picks until they get jokic's man as the screener, jokic doesn't bother to get out on SGA, and he drills the wide open three FTW.

if that was doncic, it would be the lead story everywhere. okc has hunted jokic successfully all series long, and if not for out of body experiences by aaron gordon, this would would have been over in 5, too.

 

two years later. after a trade demand. to the eastern conference. but sure, keep arguing in bad faith.

we haven't made an offer for SGA, either. fire rob.

pushed it at the behest of the thankfully-fired co-gms.

wow, so when rob is forced to trade for westbrook, it's his fault. when he makes a good move for rui, that's all westbrook's management. got it.

 

Because Jokic is simply a better player than Luka. He does Luka s*** as a 7 footer! You know the saying....great big over great small.

 

Dame might have requested a trade if we made an offer for him. I'm pretty sure that Lebron James, didn't just randomly threw his name out there.

I don't know about SGA, but we supposedly circled around Turner and Kyrie, but never actually made a real offer for either. Well scratch that, I guess at the last minute, Rob offered Westbrook for Kyrie. No picks. We could have gotten Irving that summer.

I still don't see how Rob was forced to do anything. He let his starting PG walk for nothing. The team was over the salary cap already to boot. Who was going to play PG? Buddy Hield? So it makes sense that HE saw Westbrook as the best option. Otherwise he could have said no.

He damn sure said no, to every AD request for another big. Westbrook gave him a good inside tip. He took advantage, probably the best move he's made, without blind luck.

 

i think the difference is fairly minimal. denver built the right team around jokic. nobody did around luka in dallas until last year, when he reached the finals and lost to one of the better teams we've seen in a long time. at age 25. two years before jokic sniffed the finals.

main point is that jokic is treated much differently by the fans and media. his inabilty to move on defense is actively hurting his team in a series they're losing. not a peep from the press.

 

Even though they’re up 3-2 it’s time to put to bed this idea that OKC is some all-time great team based on their regular season net rating. I think last year’s C Bags beat them. I think the 2023 Nuggets beat them. I think our 2020 team beats them. The Warriors with KD definitely beat them, and I think the pre-KD version beats them too. And those LeBron/Kyrie Cavs teams beat them.

 

I don't know man..if we had Jokic, we'd be on our way to the Finals. Denver would still be down 3-2 to OKC or headed to Cancun with Luka. IMO

Man..Jokic and Lebron? I don't think even Pelinka could screw that up!!

 

doesn't matter. dame requested a trade to miami, too. dame to la was never, ever, going to happen.

i honestly have no idea what circling around without making an offer even means. if you're in talks, it means ideas are floated. quite possible that you don't get to an offer because the talks indicate no offer you want to make will be accepted. there's no such thing as a formal trade offer. they're all informal until an agreement. so either they talked or they didn't, and all indications are we talked in both cases. that nothing happened could mean a lot of things.

he was forced to because if he didn't, lebron and AD would have b****ed incessantly. and you can't deny that, because they b****ed incessantly after that, too!

i think the irony is that if rob doesn't make the westbrook trade, he'd have been fired at the end of that first russ season. he played it smart for his own skin (poorly for the team). if jeanie really felt rob made the russ deal by himself, he wouldn't be working here right now, imo.

yes, yes, westbrook made that trade, and rob's relationship with nico was luck that any gm could have had (but, weirdly, didn't).

 

minny beat jokic's team last year. right before luka's team beat minny.

and we'd be going nowhere because lebron sprained his knee.

 

Rob and Nico relationship doesn't mean jack. We were the 3rd choice, moving on down the line. Dallas just saw AD, as a player that they would accept. If we had passed, Luka would be playing with the 4th choice. You are giving Pelinka more credit than he really deserves.

I don't think Rob cared that much about Lebron and AD b****ing...neither of them were going anywhere.

Everyone "talks " that doesn't mean anything if you aren't making an offer. All I know is the Pacers said the Lakers never made an offer for Turner. After he was going on the media rounds, taking about how it was up to the Lakers, to determine if he was worth giving up draft picks. Similar to Kyrie, damn near begging to get traded here, and the owner saying that he gave Rob, Irving's management phone number, but he never called them!

He simply didn't want to make either of those moves, for whatever reason.

We are 0-3 in our last 3 playoffs series. Going 2-12 to boot. It's was supposedly due to HC or roster. Well Rob picks the roster,and he hires the HC. If we come up short a fourth time, his a** needs to be fired. Kobe's best friend or not.

 

So what?That doesn't make Luka the better player.It's still Jokic and Lebron >Luka and Lebron. All day

Now..yeah Lebron's knee would be a killer tho. We would have beaten Minnesota. Golden State too. OkC..IDK

 

i think we lose to minny with jokic but probably beat gs. you're underrating doncic and overrating lebron (who had basically the worst year of his career this year).

luka's season last year was statistically almost identical to jokic's this year. again, last year his team beat the team that beat jokic's team. this year, luka was hurt/out of shape (jokic is also out of shape, btw), and he was moved to a team midseason that wasn't built to his strengths (jokic's team has been carefully crafted to his over a period of many years).

 

Yep, they greatly benefit from having 30 guys on that roster who are young, mostly athletic and can get out and run. They can hold up to a 82 game pace most teams can't or smart vet teams don't and watch from the sideline. Lot of that kid on Christmas morning after he's eaten all the candy in the stocking and opened all his toys energy.

They also have a foul merchant like no other in the Western Conference currently. So when you do slow it down, it's academy award season.

Even if they go to the Finals, I'm not impressed by them. They have the war chest to become scary and formidable, but i don't think this iteration of them is.

 

I still don't know if Luka was hurt or not. Out of shape...yeah...supposedly this is a common thing with him, one that Dallas evidently, didn't think was going to improve much. We shall most definitely find out more on this subject next season


TBH...This season...Luka and Lebron aren't as far apart as you seem to believe. James is still the superior defensive player to boot!

https://stathead.com/basketball/ver...=jamesle01&utm_medium=sr_xsite&utm_source=bbr

https://stathead.com/basketball/ver...=jamesle01&utm_medium=sr_xsite&utm_source=bbr

I tried to make the 2nd link the playoffs numbers. It doesn't seem to work..just click on the playoff stats.

 

Nobody thinks it's somewhat surreal, that the Lakers traded for AD, and then NO won the lottery. The Lakers trade for Luka and then Dallas wins the lottery too? Hell..we should trade for Banchero, and Orlando probably wins the lottery as well!

 

yeah, what i said prior to the playoffs has borne out. they have a bunch of interchangeably/similarly good players in wiggins/joe/wallace/dort/caruso (and in the regular season kenrich williams and even ajay mitchell probably qualified in this group). but when teams shrink the rotations, that depth becomes less useful.

jalen williams has also looked pretty cowed, sort of like harden did with okc early in his career on the big stage.

they have the pieces, but they need to consolidate their 6-7 support players into 3-4 guys they can count on to deliver in the playoffs if they want to win a ring.

then again, watch them win this year just to make me look dumb.

anyway, i've been underwhelmed in almost exactly the way i expected.

 

i don't like counting stats.





my favorite one is probably the second column above (LEBRON). you can read about why i prefer these, but in the end, they better conform to my own eye test than most others (and they probably rank players in ways you'd mostly agree with), and the logic/derivation makes sense to me. they're not perfect, but they beat the hell out of traditional box score stuff.