The Blazers Were Supposedly Ready To Send Damian Lillard To The Heat Until His Agent Reportedly Ruined Everything
Soobum Im. Getty Images.Now that Dame has officially been traded, it only makes sense that we'd start to hear bits and pieces of that whole saga. The Blazers did pretty damn well for themselves with their overall return for their former franchise player despite what Heat Twitter/Miami Media wanted you to think. Between the players and draft capital they got back, they are armed well for their pending rebuild.
One of the tidbits we're now learning is that the existing trades almost never happened because believe it or not, the Blazers were supposedly prepared to send Dame to the team he wanted all along. So what happened?
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Is this true? Who knows, but if it is….YIKES. Talk about an all-time fumble by Dame's agent Aaron Goodwin. You may remember that in the middle of this saga, his agent kept telling teams around the league not to trade for his client because he would show up unhappy. You obviously can't do that, and that's why the NBA had to issue a memo about this to all 30 teams
It's clear they miscalculated how that would turn out, and the reason I'm buying this report about the Blazers is because of what Goodwin said on the record after Dame was traded to the Bucks. He essentially doubled down on what he did
"I wanted everyone to understand that even though we didn't have a no-trade clause, a provision that's not afforded to Dame under the CBA, I was going to do everything in my power to control the market and help get my client to a place he wanted to be," Goodwin told B/R.
Well, no shit the Blazers were probably pissed about this and it changed how they approached making a deal. Now I do wonder, if the Blazers really were intending to send Dame to MIA then why would Goodwin have to do something like that? I suppose maybe the agent still went out and did that stuff anyway to try and assure that nobody else would offer anything for Dame. He clearly overplayed his hand and the rest is history.
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It is a little funny though that Joe Cronin was painted as the devil for not trading Dame to Miami, including reporters calling his actions "deplorable"
and that in reality, it was supposedly all Dame's agent's fault. That is quite a tough pill to swallow. Had Dame and his agent just let the Blazers know where they wanted to go and then shut up about it, it sure sounds like they would have gotten exactly what they wanted. Instead, Cronin went full "fuck you" mode and not only didn't trade Dame to MIA, he helped the other East contenders get better.
I don't know why they didn't just follow the playbook of say, Kevin Durant, who's a player that demanded a trade with a ton of years left and ultimately ended up where he wanted to be. You didn't hear any of the same shit being leaked from his agent/team when that trade demand first hit the Nets' front office. He gave them a list/preferred destination and then shut the hell up until it happened.
It's wild to think how much of the NBA landscape would be different right now had Dame's agent not poisoned the well like he did. There's no Ayton trade. Jrue Holiday isn't a Celtic and maybe Robert Williams still is. The Heat land their white whale. For all we know, these are some title impacting NBA "what ifs". Somewhere there's a universe out there where that scenario plays out and I'd love to see how things look.