The First Domino Falls: Blazers Swing Trade for Jerami Grant
Joe Cronin's offseason overhaul begins in earnest.
It was almost a cliche to joke about members of the U.S. men's national team trying to recruit each other during the Tokyo Olympics last July. Team USA has been a fertile ground for tampering and the formation of superteams in the past, be it Miami's big three taking shape on the Redeem Team in 2008 or Kevin Durant becoming friends with Stephen Curry and Andre Iguodala while playing in Turkey in 2010. (Shameless plug alert: I wrote a deep dive on that 2010 national team around its 10th anniversary a couple years ago.)
Last summer, Damian Lillard was the focus of much of that speculation. After the Blazers' first-round loss to a shorthanded Denver team, a disastrous coaching search and their then-general manager's lack of interest in trying to make roster improvements, Lillard was sending more signals than he ever had before about his willingness to leave Portland, and there was no shortage of talk about which of his USA teammates were trying to recruit him.
It turns out Lillard was playing the recruiting game all along, and as first reported by ESPN on Wednesday afternoon, the Blazers traded a few down-the-road picks to Detroit to reunite him with Olympic teammate Jerami Grant.
The deal was a long time in the making. Joe Cronin pursued Grant aggressively at the deadline, hoping to get him with the first-round pick that came from New Orleans in the CJ McCollum trade. At the time, Pistons GM Troy Weaver signaled that he wanted a little more certainty about where that pick would fall, meaning those talks would be revisited after the lottery. When the Pelicans made the playoffs, that pick became the Bucks' 2025 first-rounder. One would think, with Giannis Antetokounmpo still only being 29 then, that pick will be in the 20s somewhere. It still turned out to be enough to get it done.
You can probably chalk Grant's soft market up to the extension any team trading for him will presumably be expected to sign him to, which will presumably be north of $100 million over four years. It's not hard to see why a Detroit team still in the early stages of a rebuild wanted to get whatever they could before it came time to make that decision themselves. And it is a lot of money to pay a guy who will, in an ideal world, be the third or fourth option on offense. But if the Blazers are trying to put win-now pieces around Lillard, spending quality-starter money on quality starters is the cost of doing business. If you're going to pay Lillard upwards of $50 million a year into his mid-30s, you might as well also spend big on the supporting cast.
Just this morning, I wrote that Cronin is now on the clock to turn his limited assets into real roster improvements. Getting Grant at this price is a nice piece of work and a good first step towards that goal. There's almost definitely more to come, though. Expect the Blazers to still make every effort to move their No. 7 overall pick tomorrow night. That deal likely won't happen until they're on the clock, because any team trading up into that spot will need to know that the guy they're trading up to take is still on the board.
As far as the two most widely known targets with that pick, John Collins feels more likely than OG Anunoby. Hawks GM Travis Schlenk is motivated to clear long-term money from the books after running back a fluke-ish Conference Finals roster didn't go as planned. (Sound familiar?) My B/R colleague Jake Fischer reported today that Atlanta is actively hoping to move Collins by tomorrow night.
Meanwhile, Anunoby's agency, Klutch Sports (which also represents Jusuf Nurkic and Chauncey Billups), seems to be putting on a full-court press to get him to Portland, or at least out of Toronto. I'm skeptical the No. 7 pick is enough to get anything done there, but maybe that's just because of the belief around the NBA media and Twitter-sphere that Masai Ujiri has to "win" every deal he makes. Eventually, that perception backfires, as anyone old enough to remember Kevin Pritchard's run in Portland can tell you.
For now, Josh Hart's March 21 tweet after a Blazers tank-ruining win in Detroit is turning out to be prophetic. Unless Hart himself is moved, that is. Stay tuned, there's a lot more to come.