General Manager Joe Cronin used last February’s trade deadline to shift course for the Portland Trail Blazers. The then-interim executive made three moves in the lead up to the February 10 buzzer, two of which jettisoned four key rotation pieces, earning in the realm of $70 million annually, to the Los Angeles Clippers and New Orleans Pelicans.
In return, the Blazers shed a truckload of salary, generating a $20 million trade exception. The deals also yielded a couple of interesting pre-prime players, an unwanted veteran guard, a rookie with potential, an extra first round pick and a bunch of names unlikely to be NBA players beyond their existing contracts.
Many a Portland fan decried the moves, particularly the deal with the Clippers, which sent Norman Powell and the expiring Robert Covington to Southern California. For their troubles, the Blazers received a second round pick, the greenest of green prospects in Keon Johnson, veteran guard Eric Bledsoe and Justise Winslow — a former highly touted talent, who has succumbed to injury and difficult situations.
The given reason for the trade was to get the Blazers under the tax in order to allow them to execute other deals. And while some might have thought Powell’s five year, $90 million wasn’t awful, it was argued by many inside and outside the organization that the length of the deal was particularly prohibitive.
The subsequent Pelicans trade saw CJ McCollum relocate to Louisiana after seven years as Damian Lillard’s second-in-charge. Joining him was versatile big Larry Nance Jr. and underwhelming wing Tony Snell as a conditional first round pick, said trade exception, Josh Hart, Didi Louzada, Tomas Satoransky and Nickeil Alexander-Walker traveled the other way. Satoransky and Alexander-Walker were moved again the next day, this time in a three-team deal involving the Utah Jazz and San Antonio Spurs, with the Blazers receiving the expiring contract of injured Australian veteran Joe Ingles, Elijah Hughes and a second round pick.
If it wasn’t clear to onlookers that the Blazers were tanking, the team then announced that pending free agents Anfernee Simons and Jusuf Nurkic, and later Hart, would sit, as a cavalcade of unknowns saw the season out.
While the Pelicans initially thwarted the Blazers’ chances at a second lottery pick by making the playoffs, the consolation 2025 Milwaukee Bucks selection still proved enough to land what appeared to be the team’s long-term target Jerami Grant the day before the draft.
Come draft night, rumors were a flurry suggesting the Blazers were focused on dealing their own seventh pick for the likes of OG Anunoby and John Collins. Instead, Cronin chose and kept Shaedon Sharpe, a young Canadian who failed to appear for Kentucky, despite being touted as a potential franchise-changing contributor.
I repeat, for many entrenched in Blazers fandom, the moves were lambasted and Cronin was called to be fired, even before he was made ongoing General Manager.
With the benefit of hindsight, we now compare where the team currently stands with where it could have been if Cronin had stood pat at the deadline.
Where they are now?
Portland sits ever-so-slightly under the luxury tax now, thanks to the waiving and stretching of Didi Louzada. They also boast a list of valuable assets that could arguably be moved with relative ease. The Blazers have versatility. They have expiring contracts that are likely of value to other teams in Hart, Winslow, Nassir Little and Grant (although he’s probably extended).
Portland owes their 2023 first-round pick to the Chicago Bulls. Its lottery-protected status, conveying to future seasons if Portland misses the playoffs, gums up their ability to deal subsequent first-rounders. But if the Blazers were desperate to include future picks in a trade, they could probably just remove the protections, giving the pick to the Bulls regardless of how they finished this coming season.
Johnson (for…