Trade Deadline Recap

Despite having one of the most valuable bargaining chips, the Portland Trailblazers didn't make a big move before the NBA's trade deadline on Thursday. After the the deadline passing and it became clear that the only move the Blazers were going to make would be a minor one involving Michael Ruffin and saves the Blazers some money and creates a trade exception, there were a lot of questioning fans. Many of them were concerned about the Blazers making the playoffs and not being embarrassed once there.

The thing is this: outside of some extreme circumstances, the Blazers are going to make the playoffs whether or not a blockbuster trade was made or not. Do the Blazers have things they need to improve? Yes, but so does every other team in the league. Do the Blazers have a bad defense? Relative to the other playoff contending teams they do, but their offense is the second most efficient in the league. This can be fixed with the players currently on the roster. Also the names bandied about in the trade talks (Richard Jefferson, Vince Carter) probably wouldn't have fixed the teams defense issues anyways. So why hamper your roster flexibility with a big long term contract and weaken the teams depth for what looks like only a marginal improvement?

There are a couple of things about how this front office group operates. First, Kevin Pritchard learned the GM ropes during his time in San Antonio. He is trying to emulate the Spurs system of management. Part of this system values continuity. When asked about the possibility of the Spurs acquiring Vince Carter in a trade, Tim Duncan said the following:

No offense to Vince, obviously he's an excellent player. We'd love to have him. But to give up most of our team to add one guy, I don't think that's the way you want to go. It's a long season and we have a lot of guys who have been here a long time and understand the way we want to play. Just to insert one new piece and try to teach him in half a season the way we want to play isn't the way that we work.

This sounds very much like the phrases that Pritchard repeats almost ad nauseum of "culture" and "ethos". This goes a long way to explaining why of all of the deals that Pritchard has done, all of them except for players at the end of the bench (like the Ruffin deal) have been done on draft day.

Second, here is an excerpt of an interview that Tom Penn, Kevin Pritchard's right hand man/salary cap savant, gave back in September in which he talks about trade exceptions (like the one that they created with the Ruffin deal):

Blazersedge: [laughs] So you created this exception not knowing how you planned to use it? Or, did you have the plan to use the exception and then work to create it via trade?

[Tom Penn]:Well, it's more the latter. All along we knew that if we could come up with a slot about that big we could probably use that slot to do a trade with Phoenix. The plan all along was that if we had it, we knew where we would go use it.

Knowing this, it makes sense that short of an offer they couldn't refuse, it makes sense that the Blazers wouldn't make other deals. They had a trade exception, they have some ideas about how they will use it, and trade exceptions of the size that they created are best used around draft day.