End of the DominAyton Era, Dame suddenly available, and what's up with the Mid-Level?
The Blazers made a couple of moves around Draft Day to add talent, but there are still plenty of questions as they gear up for Vegas.
The Portland Trail Blazers kicked off Summer League practices on July 5 in preparation for their games in the Las Vegas Summer League, which begin July 10. If you want deeper coverage of the Summer League and Yang Hansen’s first practices at the Blazers’ practice facility, I recommend checking out the Rose Garden Report, Jacked Ramsays, and the team’s official website and YouTube page.
What follows today is not going to be a blow-by-blow of the Caleb Love-Yang pick-and-roll (Love Island + Yang City, baby!) or the expectations for Rayan Rupert entering his third summer league. We will have plenty of time to discuss how all of them look once the games get underway in Vegas. For this edition of the newsletter, I want to take a longer look at where things stand as of now, which first brings us to the departure of Deandre Ayton.
DominAyton Departure
Normally, a contract buyout of a highly-paid center on the heels of a franchise taking back-to-back first round draft picks at center would be looked at as a pretty normal move, especially when several players across the league are getting bought out due to the financial restrictions of the new collective bargaining agreement.
But the first mistake about anything Deandre Ayton is assuming anyone can be normal about him. Especially when you consider what he was getting paid. Money makes people act differently and Ayton’s perception about what he was, or wasn’t, during his Blazers tenure, is no different.
The Blazers, according to Jake Fischer, are paying Ayton nearly 26 million to play for someone else next season, after Ayton agreed to give back $10 million of his $35.6 million salary. After Ayton cleared waivers, he reportedly agreed to a two-year deal worth just over $16 million with the Lakers, with a player option for next season.
As someone who was around the locker room occasionally, I found Ayton to be one of the team’s vocal leaders, particularly during the 24-25 campaign. When Chauncey Billups challenged the team to hold each other accountable, Ayton was one of the voices echoing the coach. And while Ayton was not the ranking veteran on the team, many of the other veterans on the team were quiet and not the kind of guys who could rally the troops. Ayton, as much as he can frustrate at times with inconsistent effort, appeared to at least attempt to fill the team’s void in the vocal leadership category.
Ayton’s goofy personality can get misconstrued by some as someone who doesn’t care about anything or his teammates. His quotes about wanting to get to a second contract, something literally every NBA player would admit in private, are also used as a jumping off point to lay into him. But it’s hard for me to buy into all of that after watching him during the past season, especially during Portland’s best stretch of play in January and February. Ayton was leading vocally and on the court. He also seemed to take a real interest in supporting Donovan Clingan, who was ostensibly drafted to replace him, which is what you want out of your more established players. Ayton is only 26, but he was one of Portland’s vets. And when you look at who their best players were during the stretch where they won 10 out of 11 games, Ayton was neck and neck with Deni Avdija as the driving force behind those wins.
Which is why I find it so odd that some people in the media, both locally and nationally, turn the guy into an issue. Maybe if Ayton had started a fantasy football league, or a rec softball team for local media members covering the Blazers, he doesn’t get pilloried on his way out. But that didn’t happen. Also, everyone talking about the buyout has comically short memories: Ayton was brought in as a means to get off Jusuf Nurkic’s contract, not to mention the Nassir Little contract. Maybe you were convinced of the spin that his expiring contract, something EVERYBODY in the league agreed was an overpay the moment he signed it, would hold a lot of value on the trade market, but I never was.
And analysis about the buyout also conveniently ignores that Portland got Toumani Camara in return for helping Phoenix “solve” their Ayton “problem.” He annoyed high-profile teammates like Chris Paul and Kevin Durant and the national media took their cues from there. If you asked Phoenix today whether acting out of star-induced anxiety and fear about Ayton helped them, I bet they would admit they shouldn’t have ever moved him.
I have no doubts that Ayton will occasionally frustrate JJ Redick, Luka Doncic, LeBron James (if he’s still there), and Lakers fans. When that happens, as it happened in Portland with Chauncey Billups, they should bench him to get his mind right. But when you compare him to Jaxson Hayes, Alex Len, Trey Jemison, or even the voided trade for Mark Williams, Ayton is FAR better than all of those options. Perhaps now that his salary isn’t in the max player range, people will appreciate the things Ayton can bring to the table (great size, ability to run the floor in transition and a quality midrange threat), rather than project about what he isn't.
LeBron has spent most of the back half of his career “fixing” people that the rest of the league sees as a problem. A lot of people paint this as a negative by using J.R. Smith’s brainfart in Game 1 of the 2018 Finals as an example of why it doesn’t work. Those people also forget Smith’s personal 8-0 run in the third quarter of Game 7 of the 2016 Finals, without which LeBron would not have his crowning achievement. If LeBron isn’t in Cleveland or New York and sticks around with Luka on the Lakers, I think Ayton is going to look a lot better to people in a year.
While Portland made their choices to build around two young centers in Donovan Clingan and Yang, I think Ayton walked out of Portland with more appreciators than enemies. Fantasy football be damned.
Dame Available
In what was a shock to many, the Milwaukee Bucks waived Damian Lillard in the early days of free agency. While Giannis Antetokounmpo attempted to use the media to say that he was “upset,” the move has Giannis’ fingerprints all over it as he hopes to compete for a Finals berth in the East while staying in Milwaukee.
Just like when the Blazers traded a 2025 Bucks first round pick for Jerami Grant in the summer of 2022, there’s no way the Bucks make such a move without any indication from their star player that he’d approve of it.
And while the great what-if of the Giannis/Dame partnership is less about injuries and more about Giannis’ unwillingness to set screens for Lillard, and instead indulge his LeBron point-forward fantasies, the thing everyone wants to talk about is whether Lillard’s homecoming arc has already started.
Lillard, like he has for much of his career, will be approached by other teams in sexier markets who have more immediate title hopes. Even though Lillard probably should not play at all next season to fully recover from his torn Achilles, the thought of getting an NBA Top 75 player would be intriguing to every team, even if they have to wait. Having someone like Lillard to anchor a second unit and start occasionally when your top players need to miss games is a massive asset.
And it would also be an asset to the Blazers if he were to indeed sign with them and come back home to finish out his playing days. Nobody knows what Dame is going to do, but outright dismissing a return to Portland as his next stop would be a mistake. After deciding to chase a ring, Lillard can now at least look back on his career and have far fewer doubts about what might have been. He rolled the dice and it came up snake eyes. Nobody would blame him if he decided to walk away from the table at the Ring Chase Casino and instead try to shepherd the young Blazers as their elder statesmen.
There are a lot of options out there, but none of them is home. Dame had a lot of aging point guards mentor him in his early days, but none of them were even close to the same player he was. Having a player like him to lead the team vocally, while also bringing all of the things he does on the court, would be a major asset to this team as they try to navigate the opportunities and pitfalls of The Leap.
Regardless, Lillard has the rare benefit of having time to weigh his options, and he could choose to wait until he’s further along in his rehab before committing to another team.
Mid-Level Exception???
One of the upshots for the Blazers following Ayton’s buyout was that the team has full access to the full mid-level exception, a spot of salary worth $14.1 million. As you may have heard, teams can now use the MLE as a trade exception to absorb a salary in a trade without having to send out players to match the incoming salary. As you also may have heard, the current free agent class is probably the weakest the league has seen in years.
When you consider the options in the free agent market, I like the idea of Cam Thomas with some portion of the MLE. Thomas, I think, has become underrated as an offensive force. But concerns about his size and defense are extremely valid. The Blazers do have a lot of defenders who could help compensate for his lack of size, but given this team’s defense-first makeup, signing Thomas would be a bit of a departure. And if Lillard does indeed come home, that would make Thomas an immediate trade candidate after one year, which isn’t exactly what you want when you sign a guy.
I think right now, Portland’s best course of action is to wait and see if a mid-tier salary player becomes available via trade. And that opportunity may not come until later this summer, or closer to the trade deadline in February, when luxury tax and apron issues become more real for teams up against the league’s new financial restrictions.
The Jerami Grant Of It All
Jerami Grant was living his best life at Paris Fashion Week while NBA sickos were speculating about whether he would be traded or not. The guy, unquestionably, knows how to live. And while there’s a whole summer of free agency left to go, with the lack of any reports on Grant, it feels like things are trending towards Grant being back in a Blazers uniform next season.
As I wrote at midseason, Portland is looking at a situation where Chauncey Billups, Joe Cronin and co. will have to have tough conversations with Grant about his role moving forward, especially if they’re serious about starting Avdija and Camara.
While Grant has started and had the offense run through him the past three seasons, the Blazers are not in the same position they were when they agreed to give Grant such a role. He will need to play a role, but not the same featured role he has enjoyed since leaving Denver for Detroit in 2020.
No, it’s not ideal to have a player making as much as Grant does coming off the bench. But on the other hand, having too many talented players is a problem the Blazers haven’t had in quite a long time, which is one of the best problems you can have in the NBA. Bill Simmons made Having Too Many Guys a thing, but that hasn’t been a Blazers problem in almost two decades.
I’ll take those problems over the ones where they don’t have enough players to make a competent rotation, especially as the NBA goes further into its weak-link era.