The draft is almost exactly a day away and Kevin Pritchard has already pulled off his first trade, meaning we might be in for quite a show over the next 24 hours. But we've already got a show for you, or to be more specific, a podcast. Gavin Dawson of 95.5 The Game, Dave Deckard of Blazer's Edge.com and I, Casey Holdahl of Trailblazers.com record a day early in anticipation of the 2009 NBA Draft.
As you might expect, this week's show is draft heavy. We each give our predictions as to what we expect will happen tomorrow (fyi: no one pegged the Dallas pick trade), who might be a Trail Blazer before the weekend, whether Richard Jefferson makes the Spurs a contender, if trading up for a point guard makes sense, discuss Twitter pros and cons, find out what Dave eats for breakfast and briefly discuss my upcoming trip to Europe. Dig that!
Download the podcast (54.9 MB)
(And before you ask, Courtside didn't air on Monday due to the draft on Thursday, so that's why there's no podcast.)
The spurs trade doesn't make them that much better. It will be Bowen for Richardson. Bowen was a pretty tough defender all his life.
ReplyDeleteAbout Travis taking 6 years to grow may be right and I know much was in Jest. I don't consider the first 4 years of his career because of coaching and playing with the Jailblazers. I am a Travis lover and believer. If in fact he needs to be traded for the improvement of the team than so be it. As Dave said on Blazer Edge some has to go in order for others to get a chance to grow. Travis himself needs that time to grow. Of Course, I think it should be someone else that should be traded. Casey said it is more or less up to Travis to improve because he has the capability. That is good enough for me. If he gets traded for the betterment of the team, rather than being a bust I am alright with that. I still don't want to trade off our players for new players that need playing time. That seems senseless.
hg
I definitely don't want to lose Travis. To me he is an untouchable like Greg, Roy and LA.
ReplyDeleteOther than Roy, he's the best player on the team at creating his own shot. While he didn't have the greatest post season, I think it's safe to say we would have lost at least 5 more games in the regular season without him.
I've been looking and statistically I think you can make a case that for young small forwards, we would only get better with Carmelo, Granger, Gay, Brandon Wright or Gerald Wallace and I'd dare say that the teams that have these guys are unlikely to do a straight trade meaning that we'd have to lose something in return like say a Rudy. So anyone other than Melo wouldn't be worth it.
That being said, I may be interested if we could get an elite PG like Parker, Paul or D Williams but again we'd have to give up something like a Joel and Travis and that still wouldn't be enough so let's just be thankful we have him and encourage him to continue to improve.
Jerry:
ReplyDeleteI agree with you whole heartily, why trade off Travis just to get some one else that brings us a different set of problems.
Trading players doesn't necessarily make us better. Much like people divorcing one mate to get another, you end up trading one set of bad habits for another set of bad habits and haven't gained a thing. It could be a loss to us to get rid of Travis to satisfy a bunch of trade happy fans. In fact I think we should give all our rotation players at least one more year to see if they can improve.
I am not in agreement with the fans that think we can't make it to the championship with the team we have. Our chemistry is good, we have a year of experience, and our rotation players are becoming the experience vet that everybody wants so bad.
We have brought all-stars here before. They didn't perform any better than whomever we traded. It is true that different players excel differently in different situations.
I can see letting Frye go to give him opportunity to have more pt. I feel we already replaced him with Pendergraph.
Why can't we just keep what we have, save our cap space and go to war with our own group. I think the grass is greener here than other places.
hg