Damian Lillard trade: Blazers waited too long to face reality, and now they have a $160 million Jerami Grant contract

Well, it happened. Less than 24 hours after the free agency opened, Damian Lillard requested a trade on Saturday. according to Shams Charania of The Athleticwho also reports that the Miami Heat, as was widely reported before this official request came in, is Lillard’s destination of choice.

There will be plenty of talk about which team Lillard ends up getting, but for now I want to look at the team he leaves, which is now saddled with a five-year, $160 million Jerami Grant contract handed over by the Blazers. out shortly after the opening of the free agency window on Friday.

On Friday night I wrote about how risky that contract was for Portland with the seemingly inevitable Lillard trade request hanging over the franchise. I didn’t expect that request to come an hour after I woke up on Saturday, but I did expect it to come at some point. And when that happened, that Grant contract would look like Real bad.

And here we are.

To me, the only reason to not just give Grant, a third option non-All-Star, an average annual salary nearly identical to that of Jayson Tatum’s current contract, but to commit to that number for five years (I assume the fifth year will be a team option) was to make 100 percent sure he’d be back in Portland, to overwhelm him with an offer that was way above the market that he couldn’t refuse, because if Grant left Portland, Lillard would certainly be right behind him.

Otherwise, who did Portland bid for Grant on that kind of number? He’s a good player, but he’s not That Good. And at 30 years old in March, he’s not nearly as excited for a team on the cusp of turning into a youth movement behind Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe.

Technically, the Blazers can withdraw the offer to Grant. It’s not official yet. It would make financial sense. But there’s no way they’re going to do that. After all those other teams gave away their money? Agents would never trust the Blazers again. Portland is stuck with this deal, and not for a while.

Indeed, it’s not just the raw money that goes to Grant. It’s the years. I’m not a fan of the Mavericks giving Kyrie Irving $126 million, and again, I wonder who they were bidding against besides themselves. But at least that’s only a three-year commitment.

Even if Grant’s fifth year is a team option, four years is one long time to get stuck on this kind of money for a fringe All-Star who will be well into his thirties by the end of this deal. Under this new collective bargaining agreement, flexibility will be king, and this deal is definitely not flexible. It’s not quite Tobias Harris, but it’s not far off. It will be extremely difficult if not damn near impossible to trade him.

Under normal circumstances, Grant probably earns something closer to $120 million. Even the $130 million Houston gave to Fred VanVleet (which was also a bit too much, but Houston has the limit room and, again, it’s only a three-year deal) would have been understandable, even for a team without Lillard that wants to stay competing with Scoot, Sharpe, Anfernee Simons (or whoever they trade Simons for) and whatever comes back for Lillard.

But five years and $160 million?

There’s a belief that the Grant deal has been in place with Portland for months, that the announcement was a formality, but I can’t kid myself that Portland committed months ago to that kind of money, with no competition. If they did, shame on them.

I think that high number had Lillard’s prints all over. It was a risky, if not rather outrageous move from a front office that was either willfully naive to the reality that rolling back pretty much the same roster wouldn’t be enough to keep Dame, or has no idea how to negotiate in any shape or form . of pressure.

Again, show me the team that would give Grant that kind of money or that many years or certainly the combination of the two. When word comes, we can talk. I wouldn’t hold your breath under this new collective bargaining agreement.

I can understand not wanting to lose Grant for nothing. Maybe that’s why they should have tried to trade him last season. The same goes for Lillard. Cutting ties with a superstar, let alone a franchise icon, is never easy, but the lesson from this is that teams don’t have to wait to respond to star requests. They can and must act in their best interest.

It was in the Blazers’ best interest to trade Lillard before they were forced into a corner. Before they gave Grant $160 million. Before they drafted Scoot and almost told the entire league that they were not going to trade him, which in turn almost told the league that eventually they would have to trade Lillard. Not exactly an excellent negotiating position.

Who’s throwing a Godfather offer to the Blazers now? What, they get some preliminary picks and maybe the expiring contract of Tyler Herro and Kyle Lowry from Miami? If they were smart they would take a stronger bid from Brooklyn (a bunch of draft picks, namely along with maybe Royce O’Neale, Spencer Dinwiddie, Cam Thomas and Patty Mills), but you know how these things go. Once a star says he wants to go to a certain team, he almost always goes to that team.

So now the Blazers are at Lillard’s mercy again. The only thing they’ve done right is enlist Henderson. The moment the Hornets passed him, all the focus in Portland should have shifted to trading Lillard instead of trying to twist the idea that they were holding it all together. That wasn’t going to happen.

ESPN’s Kendrick Perkins has even suggested that Lillard made his trade request known to the Blazers when they all met on Monday. If the Blazers knew this was happening and still gave Grant that money, well I don’t really know what to say.

This stuff is hard. Neil Olshey, insufferable as he was, took a beating for never taking the “big move,” but big moves aren’t just there to be made and the Blazers had some restrictive salary situations to deal with.

Now they have another one in Grant. In a team that Lillard is likely to lose for less than he’s worth. If this request came out of the blue, fine. But it didn’t. The wind has been blowing this way for some time, regardless of when Lillard actually uttered the words.

The same goes for the Wizards and Bradley Beal. That trade was unavoidable for many years. There was a time when Washington could have gotten some huge booty for Beal. But it waited. Didn’t get a single first round pick in the deal unless you count the highly protected 2030 pick they got from the Warriors in the subsequent Chris Paul trade with the Warriors.

The Blazers had much more reason to keep Lillard than the Wizards Beal, but still they should have been paying attention to what lay ahead for them over the past year. They should have been ahead of this. Now they could start the Scoot Henderson era by playing from behind.