30 teams in 30 days: Portland Trail Blazers offseason preview
By Jeff Siegel
30 teams in 30 days is a series to get you ready for the NBA offseason — a quick preview of each team’s free agent and salary cap ramifications to help set the table for their summer.
If you haven’t heard, the Portland Trail Blazers spent some money in 2016. They doled out massive contracts to Allen Crabbe, Evan Turner, Meyers Leonard and Moe Harkless, locking the team into their current core for the foreseeable future. With Damian Lillard, CJ McCollum, Crabbe and Turner all making more than $17 million for each of the next three years, Portland has pushed all their chips in the center of the table, with no projected cap space until the summer of 2021 and heavy luxury tax penalties incoming.
Owner Paul Allen has some of the deepest pockets in the league and greenlit those contracts last offseason, but it’s hard to imagine any owner willing to incur a heavy luxury tax burden for what doesn’t look to be a championship contender over the next few years.
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Portland general manager Neil Olshey and his staff have very little financial flexibility, but they still hold three first round picks in the 2017 draft and the non-taxpayer mid-level exception to add talent to the team. However, using all four of those opportunities would create another problem — teams are only allowed to have 15 players on their team, and the Trail Blazers currently have 12 guaranteed contracts for next season, plus Festus Ezeli, Pat Connaughton and Tim Quarterman on non-guaranteed deals. It’s already been reported Portland will move on from Ezeli, either stretching his $1 million partial guarantee for 2017-18 over the next three years or taking the full hit in 2017-18. Connaughton and Quarterman are on small contracts for next season but may get squeezed out due to Portland’s roster constraints.
As things stand, below is the Trail Blazers’ cap situation going into the draft later this month, with the assumptions that Ezeli is waived and Connaughton and Quarterman are retained. Decisions on Connaughton and Quarterman’s non-guaranteed contracts aren’t due immediately, so Portland can see how the draft and free agency play out before making those cuts, if necessary.
Portland will almost certainly be a tax team for the foreseeable future, unless they use one or two of those first-round draft picks to sweeten a deal for one of their bad contracts. Attaching, say, the No. 20 pick in the 2017 draft with Evan Turner to facilitate dumping his contract on another team’s books might be a good move for the Trail Blazers in a vacuum, but in reality, it makes the team worse and doesn’t buy them a lot more flexibility. A move like that doesn’t even get them out of the tax for this season, though it does severely lighten the burden on Allen’s wallet, and still doesn’t get them under the cap until 2021.
A Turner trade could save Portland more than $25 million in luxury tax payments, but doesn’t give them any meaningful flexibility this year or in the future, while negatively impacting the team’s performance on the floor. Whatever you think of Turner as a player, trading him and a first-round pick for no return would make the Trail Blazers worse next year. They already took a step back last season; another step in the wrong direction is not in the cards for a front office spending as much as they are on this team.
At this point, it’s probably best for the team to steer into the skid and pay the tax for the next few years (easy for me to say as it’s not my $180+ million walking out the door for a mid-tier playoff team). They’d still have to deal with the roster crunch, but Portland does have the $5.192 million taxpayer mid-level exception to use on a bench guy to help their depth.
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Restricted free agents fall through the cracks every year; Miami got Dion Waiters for peanuts last summer. Olshey and his team would have to hit on their draft picks and find a diamond in the rough to fill out the mini mid-level, but it seems to be a better route than mortgaging future assets to get out of the Turner and Crabbe contracts, provided that Allen is willing to spend heavily on the team for a few years.