What happens in Vegas with Dame Lillard? | Ethan Skolnick’s Starting Five

All right, welcome to starting five here on the Five Reasons YouTube channel. I'm Ethan Skolnick. You can follow me at EthanJSkolnick and at Five Reasons Sports. Our producer today is Manny Chang, our sponsors, All Pro Construction Builders. You can find them at allproconstructionbuilders.com or allproconstructionbuilders on Instagram. Hurricane season has already started. So go to allproconstructionbuilders.com. Get the storm doors, get the storm windows, or if you just wanna stay in your house a little bit longer, get the renovations as well. They use locally made, American made products. It's a family business. Reach out to Danny and his team at All Pro Construction Builders. Again, quality is their specialty. A state certified general contractor, 305-484-4429. That's 305-484-4429. There was a report yesterday that hurricane season is gonna be especially active this year. So don't take a chance. Don't wait till the last minute. We are also sponsored by Ocean's Finest. You can find them at oceansfinest.com. That's oceansfinest.com. This is for Ocean's Finest. Seafood, this is the same premium seafood that goes to all of the cruise lines, but the good stuff, okay? Not the bleep or anything like that, the good stuff. Five star restaurants as well. Now you can get it directly to your door at oceansfinest.com. Maybe we'll get that up here as we go forward. Okay, let's get to it. Dame Lillard is still in limbo, but now he's tweeting cryptic things. So we've gone from the IG posts where he was basically posting the goodbyes from Blazer fans that are supporting him, the IG stories, and now we're on Twitter, and he's basically saying that he's shaking his head and that he doesn't know. People can know so much, but they can know so little. So that's then followed by the Chris Haynes report. No Vegas flight today. I'm actually going on Tuesday. So hopefully this happens before I get there, but we'll see what happens. The Chris Haynes report, which essentially moves this along a little bit, talks about the other teams that may be involved in this, that it could be now a four-team trade. We had thought it could be as much as a seven-team trade. Now Detroit is one of the teams that's involved. I think Greg told you that yesterday that that was a possibility. So look, there are other teams that are gonna see something in this that they may be able to get out of it and don't really have an issue with the Heat finishing the trade, and so they may help facilitate it. So Detroit could be one of those teams. We've talked a lot about Brooklyn as a possibility here for Tyler Hero more so than for Dame Lillard. And one of the things we've also said is that this little venture to Vegas where everybody is out there together could be more about Portland trying to get the right value for Tyler Hero so that they can get the draft picks that they want from that particular team than for anything else. So essentially, they become salespeople for Tyler Hero. I do believe it's going to happen. I've said that consistently throughout. I would be very surprised at this point if it doesn't happen and I do think it's likely gonna happen in Vegas. Vegas goes 7th through the 16th, so you've got essentially a nine-day window there. And again, if you haven't been to a Vegas Summer League before, it's not really about what's going on on the court. It's about what's going on in the stands. It's about what's going on in the hotel. It's about what's going on in the casino. And it's about basically brokering these kind of deals and seeing people face-to-face. This comes in from John. Ethan, this idea that Dane won't play anywhere else is crazy. He loves the game. He'll play wherever he's dealt and he needs to play hard. Perhaps, but do you want to call this bluff? I guess that's the question. Do I think that Dane would really hold out from somewhere? No, but do you really want to have the press conference in say, I don't know, Boston, where he's introducing a guy and he's claiming he wants to be there when he really didn't want to be there? I mean, PR optics are a lot of what teams do to sell tickets, to get excitement for their fans. It's one thing if somebody is kind of neutral towards a place and can be talked into it, like Kauai in Toronto, or even Kyrie in Dallas, where he ended up staying. It's another thing if it's a guy who is behind the scenes, made it clear he does not want to go somewhere and is sent somewhere. I can't think of the example where that has actually worked. Not every player gets considered sent to their first choice, but elite players don't typically get sent to a place that they absolutely did not want to go. So I do believe that Dane has some leverage here. And I do believe that ultimately, Portland is going to send him where he wants to go. And also, you know, the Boston beat writers are saying that the Celtics are not involved in this. Now they do seem to be accumulating draft picks for a move, but I don't think that that's the move. Now, also Haynes saying to sign that talks are not closed, that was on the podcast. Again, some of this is posturing both ways. I think what this is about, and I've said this throughout, is that everybody needs to save face here, except the Heat. The Heat just need to get Dane. Like the Heat fans don't care. I don't think deep, if you get Dane, if it ends up costing you one additional asset, are you really going to care? I mean, I see some of Heat Facebook that's saying, move on from him and just go with the team as you have it. I mean, I think 95% of the fans want Dane, right? So I don't think that there's anything that the Heat could do in this negotiation, provided that they get Dane, that is going to upset their fan base, right? But there are things that Portland can do that would upset their fan base or make themselves look bad in the way of the league, okay? And there are things that Dane can do that he kind of wants to avoid doing, which is really alienating people who were loyal to him. And I'm not talking about, look, I'm not talking about the front office. This isn't even the front office he was with most of the time. I mean, Cronin's been there about a year and a half, two years. I'm talking about the fans. He doesn't want to alienate the fans. So to me, this has always been about Dane saving face with them, Portland saving face in terms of the assets that they get so that they can say, hey, we got more than you said we were going to get, okay? So Woe is just kind of playing that game where it's all the way along. And then I've said this yesterday on the podcast. There's going to be a tweet that comes out when this happens from ESPN saying, the brilliant Joe Cronin with his back against the wall and a superstar who didn't want to be there anymore managed to squeeze out an additional asset from the Miami Heat. And the Heat are going to be like, because whatever the asset was, they were willing to give it up in the beginning. That's how this game works. I mean, we can argue about whether or not the Heat have made all the right moves during Pat Riley's tenure. That's a reasonable argument or whether they should have gone in on this guy or in on that guy or whether they should assign this guy for that much. But the one thing I'm fairly confident in from the Riley perspective, I mean, there's the Andy perspective and the Simon perspective and the Spolster perspective. But from the Riley perspective is, like he knows how to play this game. Like when has he gotten fleeced going for a superstar? The Shaq trade, he won, right? The Zoe trade, yes, Glenn Rice became an all-star in Charlotte, Pat won, right? The Jimmy Butler trade, Pat won. So when the trade is actually consummated, when exactly had we come out and said, oh, he gave up too much for that guy? I'm tired of hearing the name Joe Cronin. So I don't think that the Heat are going into this thinking, oh, we're going to come out of this looking bad once we get Dame. This comes in from Adam, listen, I'm tired of the narrative that Dame doesn't deserve where he wants to go because he signed that contract. They all signed the contracts now. That's what they do. Their agents tell them to sign it and then, okay, if we need a trade, we'll work on it later. This is only an issue with the national media because it's, sorry, it's only, that's it. I made the example of the Kevin Garnett trade yesterday, right? 2007, what exactly did Minnesota get? By the way, Kevin McHale and Danny Ainge are buddies. I agree with that segment, okay? So that trade from KG going from Minnesota to Boston was Al Jefferson, a bunch of role players, okay, of which even only Ryan Gomez played reasonably well after that. One first round pick, which was top three protected, okay? And another first round pick, which was actually Minnesota's first round pick, which Boston returned to them. That's it. So Al Jefferson and two first round picks. Now, I understand there's been inflation with some of this stuff, but did you see any Celtics fans that were upset about that? Did you see the national media at the time, for those of you old enough, this is what, 16 years ago, crying about how the Wolves got fleeced? I mean, the Celtics won a championship with Garnett. They won like 22 of their first 23 games that season. And it was tied in with a Ray Allen trade for the draft rights to Jeff Green. Was anybody whining about that? I don't remember it. And if you go to NBA's greatest moments, like I just did a Google search yesterday, one of them is Kevin Garnett being traded to Boston. I'm sure that they'll say the same thing about Dame to Miami. They don't even say the same thing about LeBron to Miami. So look, ignore the noise, okay? What happens in Vegas is gonna happen in Vegas. Can we say that? I think this thing gets done before the 16th. Might not be the first day, which is today. Might it be the second day. Might not be the four days I'm out there, but I think it's gonna happen in Vegas. And that's all I have to say for today because I gotta get to camp. Oh, there we are. Oceansfinest.com, premium seafood. Lobster, mahi-mahi, crab legs, all the best stuff. I had it delivered to me here. You can get it within a day at times. It's awesome. Oceansfinest.com, premium seafood. Order it for yourself today. Again, more than 40 years of experience here in Miami. All right, I feel like I have 40 years of experience covering this story. We'll have more for you as the day progresses. Obviously, if there is a trade, we'll break the podcast. Appreciate everybody joining us on Playback yesterday. Thanks to Manny for producing. Have a good day.