Truths about the Blazers' power to decide Damian Lillard's next home

Getting under the surface of the debate on how Portland should approach Dame's specific requests.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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The Harvest; Camille Pissarro; 1882

Since Damian Lillard’s Saturday morning trade request to the Miami Heat, there’s been some hubbub about what the Blazers owe Lillard in terms of his preferences and how it could impact the team’s future to ignore those wishes. I touched on this only briefly on Sunday morning:

Based on every piece of information available to us from the past decade, the persona [Lillard] embodies isn’t fake. I have no doubt he really wants to join Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo in Miami and create the ultimate chip-on-our-shoulders team. But I also don’t think he’s going to refuse to report or sabotage a team that trades for him. It’s not a believable threat in any way.

Let’s ignore the ethics of all this and talk about this from a business and team-building perspective.

The worst-case scenario when a player expresses a preferred destination and you trade him somewhere else? A believable threat that the player will not report or will sulk Harden-in-Houston style when he reports. Such a threat has not been made in this case, and it would simply not be believable if it were. This is Damian Lillard we’re talking about. So the worst-case scenario is just not in play.

One thing some folks have trotted out is that the Blazers may, by trading Lillard to the team with the best offer instead of his preferred destination, risk alienating potential future stars who could come to Portland. This has received proper pushback from folks who remind us that the Blazers have never in their history signed a top-tier free agent from another team. All the best Blazers in history have been drafted or acquired via trade. There’s no risk if losing out on future free agent stars here because free agent stars have historically not considered Portland anyway.

Another argument for giving Lillard what he wants: his agent will be less likely to work well with you if you don’t. Lillard is represented by Aaron Goodwin, who is widely respected but doesn’t have an extensive client of NBA superstars. Goodwin’s other big-name current clients include DeMar DeRozan, Matisse Thybulle and Gary Payton II. Thybulle’s restricted free agent status in Portland is a somewhat interesting wrinkle here, but it’s importance in the Blazers’ foundational future team-building pales in comparison to the Dame drama. In other words, there’s relatively little downside risk in alienating Goodwin here.

So all of that adds up to the Blazers being in position to completely ignoring Lillard’s destination desires and simply trading him to wherever they can extract the most value, right?

Not necessarily. Here are some truths pointing in the other direction.

Homegrown Blazers are watching
Scoot Henderson is now a Trail Blazer. The team and its fans think very highly of Shaedon Sharpe’s potential, too. Those players, their agents and their camps are watching all of this unfold very closely. They may be communicating with Lillard through the ordeal (or not). If this gets messy and if the Blazers as a team become positioned as anti-player in any way, that could inform future contract decisions in a non-zero way.

I’m not saying that a protracted drama with Lillard means that, say, Scoot won’t sign an early extension in three years. Not at all. I’m indicating that when it comes time to prioritize player options or, in the deep future, no-trade clauses, this whole thing could end up being a factor.

In other words: if Scoot or even Sharpe think they are the next Dame Lillard, then how the Blazers break up with the actual Dame Lillard might be relevant.

Dame’s future team wants a happy Dame
As I said, threats of Lillard acting like late 2020 James Harden are simply not believable. But there is a lot of room between a fully-invested superstar willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to win (what you’d expect from Dame in Miami) and late-era Houston Harden. (I know I just used the Harden example three times in this column alone. He earned the honor!)

Let’s say the Blazers work out a deal with the Jazz and send Dame to Utah.