2025-26 Team Developments: Trades / Free Agents / News / Rumors / Ideas

You gotta put it in perspective. They’ll be a nice backcourt but are they winning???

Shai Caruso/ Mitchell

Fox/Castle/Harper

Ayo/Edwards /Mcdaniels


so how do you compete defend????

You gotta ask yourself.

You better hope you get Gianiss

or Watson or Eason one of those guys gotta come.

You have to get Mitchell Robinson or Robert Williams.


That’s how you keep Luka happy. The way you compete at a championship level is Gianiss.

 

Luka has to have a dog with him. These two teams are two good. And then you have the Twolves lurking. There’s too much firepower lurking.

so I’d advise to make sure we put the full court press on Gianiss.

 

See what the spurs got was the gift. They didn’t have to trade Vassell or their pick or castle they just got Fox like it was a free agent add. A friggin all star.

that’s like us getting Luka and having Lavine traded to Dallas or Zion. Makes no sense.

And then we keep AD and Christie.

the funny thing is Dallas destroyed us while helping us. We were a top defense and then one of the worst.

We lost our interior defense and our top 3-D young guy. Max Christie.

can you imagine if we were

Luka
Reaves
Christie
James
Davis

that’s a championship team. That’s what the NBA allowed for the Spurs.

 

To be Frank we won’t compete with the OKCs

unless we trade for Anthony Davis Deangelo Russell came back. He can come back.

AD and Luka and Reaves

or We trade for Gianiss

or we trade for Durant


Luka
Smart
Durant
James
Robinson

We gotta really figure out what we want to do. Which way we want to go.

 

Luka
Smart
Gianiss
James
Robinson

 

Actually Durant is the guy who can compete with Wemby. When he’s healthy. His ability to shoot his length and size he can dribble around him and shoot over him. And get his shot up and make him chase him around.

Sometimes yall gotta take your personal out of it and just think basketball.

Luka and Durant is a devastating combo because Durant doesn’t need the ball. And they’d be spacing everybody all over the court. Wemby and Chet.

add LeBron going to the basket. That’s great basketball. You get a Rolling Center like a Mitchell Robinson or a John Collins jr. And now you’re cooking. That team would run the NBA. To some degree it would be like Curry Durant.

Wemby has trouble with Curry. Shai as good as he is doesn’t shoot like Curry and Luka.

And then throw in a young dog like Ado Thiero for defense getting after it and you got something.

that’s the only way you’re going to do it. And Mark Walters has to think like that.

even to some stretch maybe the Lakers should get Lauri Markenen. Have him serve as a Gasol. Him and Luka would be great together.

 

You keep saying the NBA allows it - NBA didn’t allow anything, the teams freely traded. Blame the player and not the game, Kings did a stupid trade, they do that often.

The Wemby draft pick in my opinion was a setup. But the rest is all fair. It is what it is, it’s up to us to improve.

And absolutely don’t want Giannis, heck of a player but after seeing reports that he has no standards from Turner with practicing or being on time - no thanks.

 

it's not a crucial debate, but my point is that maybe the stats aren't capturing differences that, to me, are plain as day in the videos we both posted. jones can actually take two dribbles from beyond the three point line and finish at the basket. there are levels to bad offense, and vando's at the very bottom. also bear in mind vando has played with lebron, luka, and reaves. herb has played with the likes of jordan poole as a shot creator.





anyway, the linchpin is the three point shooting. you cite the 30%, but he's shot 40% for a full season on decent volume, and for his career is 35%. vando's a career 29% shooter on low volume whose best season was 33%.

i just don't think they're the same player at all. now, do i love jones's salary going forward? no. but i don't think he'll find himself played off the court in the playoffs, either. i'd be banking on luka having a similar effect on his offense as he did for djj.

 

Rodman, ralph Sampson. Kevin Garnett.pre achilles injury durant on wemby

 

Herb shot 33%, 33%, 40%, 30%, 30% from 3 over 5 years. I think one of those years is clearly an aberration and it’s what’s pulling him up from being classified as a career 32% shooter.

As Herb’s athleticism has been hampered by injuries, his FG% has dropped to 43 and then 38%, which is extremely bad.

When you look at the breakdown of shots outside the paint, 60% of them are open or wide open, and be shoots 32% on those. He shoots 30% on catch and shoot shots of which is 50% of his diet. If you have a look at his O-LeBron outside of a single fluke shooting season, he is terrible offensively. There’s a reason people leave him wide open. I’m not so crash hot on paying 25m per year for that.

Defensively he is better than Vando sure. How does Thybulle score on LeBron in comparison?

 

i think maybe by "the nba" he means, like, collectively--as opposed to the league office?

and i get that angle. the same league that basically started a riot to stop the chris paul trade just sat back and watched that fox trade with a smirk (and totally freaked out about the luka trade around the same vicinity). i agree with kobenluka that if there were rumors we were going to trade for fox using 4 1sts (2 protected, one of ours during a run in which we were expected to be contenders, and one of minny's during what will still be the ant years) and basically salary ballast (no useful rotation player), the fans and media backlash would have prevented the trade from occurring, imo. that's part of why keeping the luka trade a secret was so important.

 

1. his big injury was his shoulder. he had some ankle issues this year, but nothing major.
2. djj couldn't shoot before dallas. that was the book on him and why he was a vet min level player at that point. then he got with luka, and it was no longer a big deal. he scaled up in volume while still shooting a meh percentage, and voila, he's a key part of a good team instead of a bench player on bad teams.

thybulle:



i gave a longer look here. he's obviously a great defender, but as we've discussed, he just doesn't stay on the court (and his persistent knee issues are the kind that should worry you more than herb's shoulder injury). and his better shooting doesn't seem to help his teams on offense. also, if you're going to exclude herb's best shooting year, you should exclude the 45 total games from thybulle's last two years (his best shooting years) and find that they're equally bad.

now, could he also get a luka bump? i think so. and then what's his price going to be on the FA market? and if we pay it, who goes? part of my interest in herb is that i think we could get him without losing a current player we value. if we end up just paying more for a vando...we're kind of used to that (in my proposal, we're just trading essentially dead salary weight). if he reverts to herb from 18 months ago, that's a huge win.

anyway, yeah, if thybulle can be had easily without losing someone we want, that's the play. i'm just not sure. i got burned estimating the FA market last year when capela and lopez both went for double what i thought their market value was.

 

If we look at the last two seasons:

O-LeBron
25: Herb - 11th Percentile
26: Herb - 26th Percentile

25: Vando - 26th Percentile
26: Vando - 17th Percentile

That looks pretty similar to me.

D-LeBron
25: Herb - 84th Percentile
26: Herb - 84th Percentile

25: Vando - 65th Percentile
26: Vando - 74th Percentile

I tend to agree with this as well. Herb is obviously better but not out of the realm of comparison.

I took out the 24/25 year as I think Herb was clearly the better player and I thought he was trending towards what Jaden McDaniels has become today. Except he took two steps back each year since then and is closer to Vando now except paid twice as much.

 

I’m not discounting Herb’s 40% year from 3 because it was an aberration, I’m discounting it because since then he has two years at his worst ever shooting of 30% each year. If he was trending in the right direction I wouldn’t have a problem but he is getting worse. I also don’t think it’s a shot diet problem, he gets two thirds of his shots open or wide open. Lots of corner 3’s. He just hasn’t been able to bury them. On top of that he isn’t finishing in the paint like he did when he was younger.

See I’m terrified of that way of thinking. My hypothesis is, we had 40m of useless salary last year (Vando 11, Gabe 11, Kleber 11, Shake 4, Knecht 3) and that’s why we ran a 6 person unit in the playoffs. We improved that a bit by getting off Gabe this season. But we still had Kleber 11, Vando 11, Knecht 4. I think that could have been converted into one very good player that maybe could have given us a 9 man rotation this year and a 5th starter.

So I absolutely do not want to take 25m and waste it on the bench. Our next moves have to be our best moves, otherwise our trade assets are gone and Luka and Reaves are going to be a 2nd round exit every year and we’ll go the way of the Bucks and flame out and waste our MVP level players prime.

As for Thybulle, sign me up for 6m or less. That’s a fair chance to take, if he keeps playing like he has but gives us 60 games. We have a 5th starter for a pittance.

 

Shameful choker

It was wabbit season out there

 

the only explanation would be that the shoulder injury on the non-shooting side ruined him. that seems unlikely to me.

anyway, still think gambling on someone who has actually done the things we need someone to do beats hoping someone who has never done them suddenly does.

i'm assuming worst case scenario (pre 2025 herb is dead, as you suggest). i mean, in a lot of people's preferred scenarios, we're investing 30 million in kennard and rui, who by many measures were worse than herb last year.

here we agree. i just think we're going to have to gamble and win. and i think rob is or should be ready to gamble in ways he hasn't been for the past few years.

teams aren't just trading or letting guys walk who are surefire solutions to our problems, imo.

and i'm not even that in the bag for herb, specifically. i've also advocated paying a lot for jalen suggs, who would also be considered a pretty huge risk (i agree).

yeah, me too. but what makes us sure he's going to be available at that price?

always watch out for bird rights guys, imo. blazers own bird rights on both williams and thybulle. all their principals are locked up for a total of only 170m next year. why would they let these guys walk at the prices we throw around? why not just offer thybulle a 1-year 15m deal? if he plays, great! if he doesn't, he's an expiring contract. on his side, he makes more than he will on the open market.

in short, i'll be very surprised if either of those guys is available at the prices people are imagining. if portland was in financial trouble, sure, maybe. but they are definitely not.

 

https://craftednba.com/players/comparison/herbert-jones-vs-jarred-vanderbilt

Jones and Vando

 

The Portability metric is interesting.It measures how well a player would fit in with 4 random players.In this instance Vando is much more reliant and a specific lineup group than Jones.