The age of Brunson, Grimes, IQ, etc doesn’t determine our window. The number of years we have them on good contracts does. Our window isn’t very long.

Dame’s gonna make $63MM in his age 35 season, and yes, that’s not great.

But what y’all are missing with Joel is that if you trade for him, you’re getting his next contract, too, which is gonna be a 4 or 5 year supermax that starts in the first year of the new TV deal when the guy is 31 years old. That deal is gonna be the biggest, dumbest risk since we signed Amar’e.

Dame Lillard was just available for a pittance and all we did was kvetch about his injury history and his salary. Joel’s an even bigger injury risk

Number of career surgeries:

Damian Lillard: 1 (abdominal; 6 weeks recovery)

Joel Embiid: 4 (hand, thumb, foot, knee; 122 weeks recovery)

*

Damian Lillard is a much safer bet to earn his money.

Another example would be trading for a guy that you know can play, but who has had off the court issues that could blow up at any time. Dallas is gambling with Kyrie.

Another example would be trading for a very god player that doesn’t look like an ideal fit. So you aren’t sure if it’s going to work.

Leon is doing what I’ve been advising for as long as I’ve been posting here. He’s finding quality players via draft, free agency and trade and he’s getting them on mostly attractive or fair deals. It’s the old “just win the deals” mantra by valuing players well and being patient. They all blow a few, but if you get mostly good deals and select quality players, you are going to accumulate a lot of assets that can be rolled into star if one becomes available.

There’s risk we’ll never sign a star, but there’s some risk in every approach.

But making the strategy work (to the degree that it has worked, not everyone agrees that it has) required patience and prudence. So, in that sense, I’m not sure what risk-averse really means. Should Leon have done whatever he needed to to outbid the Cavs for Spida? Should they have traded for Russ? Gobert? Durant? LaVine? Lillard? Jrue? Would the roster/asset bank/cap situation have been better positioned right now had they done any of those things for the price it would have cost? Would we be any closer to contending for and possibly winning a championship in the next 5 years? Personally, I don’t think so, but I guess it’s possible.

The one area where I think your risk-averse criticism is warranted is in their handling of their draft picks. It seems that with a bit more creativity, they could have had a decent store of future picks and still have created the cap conditions necessary to do things like retain Mitch, sign Brunson, iHart and DDV, and trade for JHart. but then you have to get into who they actually would have drafted, so it’s a murky science.

At the end of the day, the end kinda justifies the means. Leon committed to a highly risky strategy and has executed it mostly competently and with some resilience in the aftermath of obvious blunders. He has done this in large part by not taking foolish risks, but I’m not forgetting that he was also bailed out of a terrible decision on the Spida deal by the Cavs, which was an incredibly risky proposition even by your definition.

they’re on the same time table as the magic and hornets…a few years away from being a few years away…

i’m so glad we are not terrible any longer…

Edit: why am I watching this game…I don’t deserve this…

think I might have found a pretty good mid-level trade target… Bojan Bogdanovic

I thing Bojan is a good target but I worry about his age. If the the trade is Fournier and the Detroit pick back, I’m good with that but who does he push out of the rotation?