On Monday afternoon, Trail Blazers general manager Joe Cronin took questions from the media at the Thomas & Mack Center regarding Damian Lillard's trade request and the team's approach to free agency.
Cronin discussed Lillard's request for a trade, the team's attempts at trying to put more pieces around the All-Star guard, trying to appease both the player and the organization, trying to make deals when requests are made publicly, whether the team is in a rush to get a deal done and his own thoughts on his performance as general manager.
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Joe Cronin Press Conference | 2023 Free Agency
Joe Cronin: So, my goal is to be as upfront and forward as possible but as far as any negotiations, trade details, those kind of things, I’m not going to talk about those.
Are you at all frustrated that Damian stating he’ll only accept a trade to one team hurt your ability to negotiate?
Joe Cronin: Frustrated, no. I understand. I think obviously that’s a place that he wants to be and that makes sense for him as far as the rest of the makeup of the team and all of that. As a team, you always hope that you have more options. To have limited options like that, I wouldn’t call it frustrating, but it prevents you from perhaps seeking out the best return. So it’s something we’ll have to work through.
You’ve stated on multiple occasions that the team is building around Lillard. What changed?
Joe Cronin: Well, building around Dame has always been the goal, all the way even through the draft. The difficult things that we ran into were finding the right deals. In the previous two years we drafted at seven, we drafted at three. In the meantime, we were scouring the market looking for more win-now players and what kept happening was those players just weren’t available. So each time we just tried to weight that. In Shaedon’s draft, pick seven, what does that look like versus what’s available on the market. And the answer was obvious: Shaedon is better. And same thing happened this time. What does pick three look like versus the return in the market and it wasn’t close, had to go three. So it wasn’t necessarily intentional, it was just doing what’s best for this team. We kept doing that and I could see why Dame would look at it and say ‘Well, this isn’t a win-now opportunity, or at least as much of a win-now opportunity as some other places. From that regard, I mean, I understand his position and I respect it. It makes sense to me why he would look to go elsewhere.
Are you prepared to go into the season with Dame on the roster?
Joe Cronin: The goal is always to have Dame as a Trail Blazer, it always was and always will be. We wanted him to retire a Trail Blazer, so we’re very open minded to any time Dame wants to be a part of us.
In general, if there is a Dame trade, what are you hoping to come away from it with?
Joe Cronin: In any deal, the goal is to come out with the best outcome, so for us, that could be many different things. It could be more of a win-now player, and that would be intriguing to us. It could be a young player and picks and that would be intriguing. It could be just picks, we would look at that as well. For us, it’: How can we maximize this return? I don’t think we have any set parameters, we would evaluate each de3al case by case and choose the best one.
If it’s to get a win-now player, is there a better win-now player out there than Damian Lillard?
Joe Cronin: There is not.
You met with Dame after the draft and before free agency, in which you only brought back returning free agents layers rather than bringing in new free agents. What happened there?
Joe Cronin: Free agency, the top priority was to retain Jerami Grant, which we did, and then the goal was to retain Matisse Thybulle as well. Meanwhile, there were a lot of different trade scenarios were were working and other free agents we were talking to. Our goal wasn’t to be super active directly in free agency, it wasn’t a market that we wanted to get heavy into. There were some players we were talking to and still are that may make sense. But for us, the goal to improve has always been via trade. It’s continuing to work those deals.
After drafting Shaedon Sharpe and Scoot Henderson in consecutive drafts, wouldn’t you want to trade Dame in order to rebuild like some other teams?
Joe Cronin: I think one thing I’ll say about Shaedon and Scoot and Anfernee is I think they’re going to be win-now very soon. I think we saw that with Scoot the other night, he’s not your normal 19 year old. Those guys are going to impact winning very soon in this league. I think Anfernee is the same way where Anfernee has show that he can be a high, high end, high usage, efficient scorer in our league and is ready to impact winning and get us to a new level. So I think for us, it’s continuing to build. We really like our talent base, with or without Dame, and how do we just keep supplementing these guys and put the best talent around them?
But if you can't get veterans, isn’t it just best to trade Damian Lillard?
Joe Cronin: How do you replace Damian Lillard, you know? Who is the person on the marketplace who is available that is a better player than Dame? No team more than us knows what this market looks like, we’ve been trying for 18 months to find the Dame equivalent at another position or someone that’s 80 percent of Dame even. That’s the challenge and that’s why we’ve got to keep working it.
How do you balance wanting to “do right by Dame” by sending him where he wants to go versus making a deal that’s in the best interest of the Trail Blazers’ present and long-term future?
Joe Cronin: Dame’s obviously a very important person and player to us. What the rest of his career looks like matters to us and we care about that. At the same time, we have to do what’s best for us and we’ve got to find the right deal, find the right makeup of the team that we’re going to go forward with. So you hope that you can find that perfect situation where that lines up and he goes to a place that he wants to and you get the best return possible. It’s complicated and usually it doesn’t work out just like that but my history has shown -- I’ve done this with CJ McCollum and Josh Hart where we worked together to find them good landing spots and getting a fair return for the Trail Blazers. So it’s possible but there’s a lot of work involved and often it involves more than just one destination.
This is obviously complicated once it’s public, how much more difficult does that make your job, if at all?
Joe Cronin: It can complicate it because it is louder than your normal situation, especially ones that we’ve dealt with recently. But at the same time, you just try to keep perspective and understand that let’s focus on what matters here. Whether there’s all this external noise, the fact remains we want to do what’s best for our team and he wants to get to a spot that makes the most sense for him. So trying to keep our eye on the ball as much as we can, I would say, and avoid as many distractions and curve balls as possible.
Dame’s agent, Aaron Goodwin, was very vocal last week that Dame would not deviate from that thinking. Do you still have hope that this can be salvaged or have you resigned yourself to the id3a that you have to move him?
Joe Cronin: I haven’t lost hope just because I understand this league is complicated and things change very quickly. Sometimes we gain more information, sometimes things aren’t what we thought they were. It’s just something that, in this league, we constantly have to stay nimble and adjust to changing circumstances. I view it like that. I don’t know what the future holds, I don’t know what will end up happening here just knowing that I won’t be surprised if something different happens than we were originally expecting.
Were you surprised by Dame’s trade request and do you feel there were deals available in the last week and a half that would have satisfied Dame?
Joe Cronin: I wouldn’t say surprised. Dame has been great about communicating with us throughout his career. Over the last three months since the season ended we’ve had numerous, numerous meetings with Dame where we understood is perspective and what his concerns were, so when those concerns weren’t addressed by July 1, I understood why he went in that direction. It made sense to me. It didn’t surprised me, I would say. Any time a player that you care about that much brings that news to you, it does jolt you. So when you finally hear the truth or you finally face that reality, it was jolting, but I wouldn’t say surprising, just because I knew he had concerns about the direction we were heading.
Do you believe that there was a pathway the last couple of week that could have gotten you there?
Joe Cronin: There were so many deals that we were constantly talking through with teams. There’s so many you think are right there and then you lose it or it resurfaces. So I don’t know if we had anything teed up incredibly to where we thought it was a 90 percent chance of happening, but there were a dozen deals that made sense for us that had a pretty good chance of happening. I would have liked to have seen how that would have played out but I understand, by July 1, if you don’t have it, you may not have it two weeks later either.
You look at the current roster and there are a lot of the same issues with depth and size that were also issues last season. How do you go about fixing the roster with this hanging over everything?
Joe Cronin: What I’ve really done, for the most part since the trade request, is press pause as far as transacting because I wanted to keep some flexibility with the back of our roster. We have some roster spots right now, certain deals we could be doing would be three-for-one kind of things where we’re going to need some roster spots. But with that you see guys going off the board, right? So we try to keep as much warm as we can with the free agents that we’re talking to but they can only wait so long. So those are the ripple effects of something like this that does kind of make you press pause. And we’re not alone in that, there’s other teams that I think are doing the same thing where it’s, okay, let’s maintain flexibility here because there could be some fairly big player movement happening.
There’s been a number of these kind of trade requests lately, some teams move quickly, some teams drag it out. What lessons have you taken from watching these situations play out throughout the league and do you have a preference on the pacing?
Joe Cronin: I think what I’ve learned more than anything is patience is critical. Don’t be reactive, don’t jump at things just to seemingly solve a problem. I think the teams that have ended up in the most positive situations post-trade have been the ones that have been really diligent and taken their time and not been impulsive or the teams that really kept their urgency under control. So I think that’s how my approach has been with this and will be with this is we’re going to be patient, we’re going to do what’s best for our team, we’re going to see how this lands and if it takes months, it takes months.
Do you feel like you did everything you could to build around Dame and what is your message to a fanbase that is upset that their franchise player wants out?
Joe Cronin: I don’t feel that I did everything because I wasn’t able to get done what we had hoped to get done. The effort being there, which it was, that’s one thing, but actually following through and getting the result is a whole another, and to that extent, I do feel like I failed Dame where our goal was to always build around him and be as high level as possible as quickly as possible. Whether even internally if we thought, well hey, we’re going in the right direction here, we can get there pretty quickly, if he didn’t feel that, it was still a failure on my end in just not finding that right deal.