Miami Heat; Oubre gone, Riley 'daring' Blazers? (Toronto a threat?) | Five on the Floor

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You can check out prize picks directly at prizepicks.com, the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, but make sure you're using the code five. Make sure you're using the code five because it's a great deal. You get that initial deposit matched up to $100 and this is free money. You don't have to worry about rollovers or anything like that. Go to prizepicks.com, play the NFL, NBA, MLS, MLB, esports, boxing, and more. Go to prizepicks.com, use the code five. Now, today's episode. We're here to bring the heat. Y'all can hang it up. Welcome to Five on the Floor, a daily insider show on the Miami Heat and the NBA, featuring Ethan Skolnick, Greg Sylvander, and Alex Toledo, plus others from the Five Reasons Sports Network. All right. Welcome back to Five on the Floor on the Five Reasons Sports Network. Here's today's floor plan. I'm Ethan Skolnick. You can follow me at EthanJSkolnick and at Five Reasons Sports. Just don't follow me to where I am. We're on the road this week a little bit and just trying to put podcasts out whenever something happens. I've snuck into a hotel and I'm close to a real estate convention. If you hear bad elevator music in the background, that might be Madonna. That's what that is. We've got Alex Toledo. You can follow him at Tropical Blanket. We're trying to update you on the latest stuff with Dame every day until this trade happens or doesn't happen as we lead up to training camp. Also, we are mixing in some other episodes. Make sure you check out our episode about what Josh Richardson, who we know is going to be on the Miami Heat, will bring to the team this year. All right. So we're going to get to a couple of different things here as we go forward. And the first thing I want to touch on, just because we didn't get to this yesterday because we did the Richardson episode, was Kelly Oubre signing with the Philadelphia 76ers and Heat Twitter going into a total conniption. And look, I just want to make it clear on this, OK? We did not report that Oubre was targeted for the Heat under any circumstances. What we reported, and we were consistent on this, was the Heat actually had limited interest in him, but their interest in him was tied to Dame coming and the possibility of Kayla Morton going out. OK, that's what we've reported on this. But it also doesn't mean that just because Oubre didn't sign here that Dame's not being traded here. I can assure you that Kelly Oubre is not a sticking point for Dame Lillard. The player who hasn't made the playoffs in Kelly Oubre in six years is not a sticking point for Dame Lillard. I've also told you here repeatedly, and we have on off the floor and on playback, that the Heat would prefer to keep the roster spots as open and flexible as possible, regardless of what the roster is, Dame or no Dame, because they like young, hungry players competing for those spots, and they've had better luck with those type of players than the players who stay on the list forever, like an Oubre, like a Christian Wood. We've talked about both of them, and they've considered both of them, but they prefer to have young, hungry players who are developing into the next Max Struess, the next Gabe Vinson. The names that you ultimately know, they like them before their names, and they're actually competing for those spots. So I don't think the Heat are losing any sleep over this. I don't think it means that Dame is not coming to Miami. I don't think things are correlated. What matters to Dame Lillard is that Jimmy Butler is in Miami, Gamal Abayo is in Miami, Pat Riley is in Miami, Eric Spolster is in Miami, and Miami is in Miami. That's what matters to him, not Kelly Oubre. All right, the second thing, and then I'm going to go to you here on this, Alex. Woj had another report today, and we've made it pretty clear that, you know, who we think that Woj is, I wouldn't say favoring in this situation, but certainly carrying a little bit of water for, and it's more the Portland organization clearly than the Miami organization. He did report today that the Heat are essentially, they want Dame Lillard, I mean, duh, but they're essentially daring the Portland Trailblazers to find a better offer, which we have told you. We've told you that the Heat have not spoken to the Blazers about anything significant, at least this was as of last week, since after summer league, when essentially the Heat said to the Blazers, get your house in order. If you're not going to give us a roadmap or anything, come back to us when you know basically what you want, and also we've said they're not going to go out there, the Heat aren't, and devalue their own players by offering them all over the league if Portland, for a three or four-way trade, if Portland is not serious about ultimately consummating a deal. So nothing's changed there. The fact that, again, Woese is reporting that the Heat have essentially dared Portland to find an offer, Alex has led to another conniption on Heat Twitter, which is like, oh, Pat's going to let Dame slip through his fingers because he's trying to get too much. No, this is business. There is no other offer out there right now that we know of, and this is just negotiation. This is what you do. Are you concerned, before we get to more speculation about mystery teams, are you concerned about either Oubre going to Philadelphia, I don't think you were a fan of his anyway, or the fact that the Heat are essentially daring the Blazers to beat their non-offer right now, because again, the teams are not even really talking that much as far as we know. So with the Oubre thing, I mean, I'm not a big fan of his, but I was a fan of the idea of signing him for the minimum, in the same way that I was for Christian Wood. It's like guys who may have red flags, but who may have some upside for you, and then it's kind of a, you know, a no risk, potentially relatively high reward type of guys that they could have taken a chance on to play a role for a contending team. I think, you know, there was some excitement for that, just to have those type of guys playing a role, because they already got a couple of value signings at the veteran minimum between Jay Rich and Thomas Bryant. I think guys are like, yeah, let's get everybody at the minimum. It would have been cool, but I'm definitely not upset about it. I think there's already kind of a jam in the front court rotation anyways, and you know, maybe one or two of those guys go out the door in a Dame deal, you know, if you're counting Duncan as one, and then potentially one of the two younger guys, but even then, it's still kind of jammed up, because the two younger guys are not necessarily projected to play big minutes at the moment, you know, depending on how the rotation stands out. So again, the Oubre thing would have been weird, because you would have wanted him playing a clean, nice role. The minutes would have been, I think, inconsistent if it didn't go so well from the start. I don't know. I didn't think it was the cleanest fit, and then for the second part, I thought it kind of made me laugh when I saw the way that Woj framed it, right, where it's like, he's kind of saying similar things that you guys have been saying for a while, right, when it comes to just like, well, yeah, the Heat don't have competition in the market for Dame right now, and so they're not gonna scrounge and go and, you know, give them everything, give the Blazers everything. The same thing that Windhorse said the other day, except he's framing it in this way where it's like, the Heat are daring the Blazers to go find another team, right? But they may F around and find out. It's the same information. It's the same information. No, it is. It's just being framed in a way that is kind of like, it's like Joe Cronin directly saying to Woj, tell them that they're gonna F around and find out, you know, like, find out what, okay? Like, the mystery team for, you know, I said it's basically Space Jam, okay? It's, that's the mystery team, or maybe it's the cartoon characters that Michael Jordan's Space Jam team was playing against. We'll get into some of the mystery team stuff, but I just want to hit this on- The Monstars? You know, again, there's player fit and there's personality fit, and I think with both Wood and Oubre, there were personality fit questions that didn't make the Heat jump. Like, their attitude was, okay, like, if we need additional pieces, if these are guys that would fill out a roster with Dame, terrific. Maybe if they didn't have so much of a jam in the front court as it stands. Well, right. We're saying that because we did like a whole summer, a whole year of not having enough front court depth. Well, they have some depth, but, you know, I disagree with those who say that they're not going to have any depth if they trade Dame. I still think that they're going to have depth in that situation, and I apologize for some of the background noise here, but, you know, I still think that that's a possibility for them to be able to fill out this roster pretty well. And again, I think when they look at the list, they say, as I've said repeatedly, the list is the list. The list wasn't going to change, and it's been the same list forever. And I come back to this quote that, you know, an executive on the Heat said to me, when we've gone after that kind of player that's been out there forever, it hasn't worked out very well for us. And I think when you look historically at the Heat picking up, you know, these guys who've been out on the free agent list, it has not worked out for them. Even with some of these reclamation projects, you go back to Greg Oden, Eddie Curry, there's a long list of players that they've brought in, and it has not panned out for them. So they prefer to have the young developing guy who makes a name for himself, as opposed to the name who has made his way onto a list where he can't get more than the minimum. So I'm not saying that Oubre and Wood can't be productive players. I just didn't look at them and say, OK, these are must-haves. Like, these are OK to haves. Like, that's what it is, you know. And the Heat get Dame Lillard, nobody's going to give a damn about Kelly Oubre or Christian Wood or anything like that. They're going to care about Dame, Jimmy, Bam. You still have Josh Richardson on the roster. You still have Kevin Love on the roster. You're likely still going to have Heywood Highsmith on the roster. By the way, I think he's going to have a better year in the Heat system than Kelly Oubre would have had. They may have Caleb Martin on the roster. They may have Tyler Herro on the roster. They may have Duncan Robinson on the roster. We don't know how all that's going to play out. They may have Jaquez on the roster. But I think ultimately that this is one of those, OK, freakouts, because Heat fans are just on edge right now because they're scarred. But then I come back to this. Like, there were some younger Heat fans that were going off yesterday on Twitter about Pat always fails in these situations. I mean, how old are these people on Twitter? That's what I want to ask. Like, this is an organization that has gotten Zo, Mashburn, Shaq, Hardaway, Drogic, Butler. I mean, go through the list of all the guys. LeBron and CB. And well, yeah, you always have to throw that in. But they've gone out and got the disgruntled guy over and over and over up through Jimmy. Now, just because they've missed on some guys, they also missed on some guys pre-Jimmy. It was good. They missed on like Mo Williams, like Gordon Hayward. OK, sometimes going after the guy is not the best. I think in this case, this is the right guy. But this idea that he can't close a deal because they didn't close Bradley Beal or some of these others when this Heat group is the exact same for an office they've been for the past 25 years. And you think that they're going to blink in a situation like this when they got Alonzo Mourning a day before the season started to rebuild the franchise back in 1995? I just think he fans just need to chill, frankly, on that stuff. We'll see if it actually happens. But Kelly Oubre signing in Philadelphia has no relevance to whether Damon's up here. But when we come back, I do want to get into a couple of the teams that have been floated out there. We did Greg, myself and Brady did a whole episode on mystery teams. I ran some of them by the Heat. They had a somewhat similar list with a couple of differences. But there's a team we haven't talked about a lot. Toronto that's been getting a lot of press today. I don't know how real it is, but we will actually get into what that would look like. We do want to mention another great sponsor of the Five Reasons Sports Network, our friends over at Better Edge. You can find them at BetterEdge.com. Use the code 5RSN. You get $20 to play. This is legal sports betting because you're betting against others who use it. You're not betting against the book. Go to BetterEdge.com. We have a contest there right now. This week, you can beat our guy Andy. He goes by GoatedMarino on Twitter. I don't know where the heck that name comes from. But anyway, you can beat Andy. Pretty much everybody beat Tony Schwartz last week, Sean Rochester the week before. And I'll be actually the pacer next week. So go to BetterEdge.com. You get $20 to play. And our contests are only $10. Seems like a pretty good deal. You got $10 in your pocket, even if you lose. So go to BetterEdge.com. Use the code 5RSN. All right, let's get to this. Mark Spears threw out there that there was an East mystery team. Mark is one of the reporters, as I mentioned. I have a personal relationship with Mark, but also I just trust him. He's not somebody who just throws stuff out there. He also happens to be very close with Dame. They have an Oakland connection. So again, he's not doing Portland's bidding on this, OK? As opposed to maybe some others. He threw out an East mystery team. Everybody kind of jumped to Philadelphia, which I know is a team that the Heat are a little bit concerned about in the background. But then the speculation has kind of turned a little bit more towards Toronto, which we've talked about as a dark horse, because Messiah is always dangerous. But he doesn't seem like you know which direction he's dangerous lately. I don't know if he's trying to win, rebuild. He seems like he's sort of stuck in the middle. They didn't re-sign Van Vliet. They did go out and get a center who they re-signed, Jacob Hodel. And of course, they still have Siakam on the roster, but they were kind of trying to move him. But he didn't want to sign an extension anywhere else. Adenobe has been in some trade talks. And Scotty Barnes seems to be one of their build around pieces. They also signed Dennis Schroeder as a stopgap point guard. He just played very well in the World Cup. Alex, do you view Toronto as a threat here? Not a big one. Just the fact that we were talking about for so long that there hasn't really been a sleeper team brought up by other media members. Maybe we jinx that and now the Raptors have come up, but that's not really how I feel. I just think it kind of feels like the Blazers are throwing it out there. Maybe that's just wish casting, like you like to say. It's kind of hopeful thinking from a Heat fan perspective, just to say the Blazers are trying to make something happen where there's not really any smoke. But I don't know. I think the anxiety comes from the fact that they've done this before. Now, it's not an apples to apples situation like we talked about. It's a four-year deal that Dame is under, whereas Kawhi was under one year. Now, there's pros and cons to that for the Raptors. It's not like he's going to leave him for agency the next summer like Kawhi did. Potentially, he might not want to play from the start. I don't know that he would sell himself on being good with the Raptors. He sold himself on non-championship contending teams in the past, so who knows? I guess that's where some of the anxiety comes from. But for me personally, I don't think of them as a big threat. I've been spending the past little while trying to figure out the amount of tradable first-round picks that the Raptors and the Sixers have. You weren't asking me about them there. There's been some conflicting information because I've seen tweets from people who cover these teams saying that both teams only have two tradable first. Again, this could be an error from my end. Looking up the draft pick situation, by my math, a team can only trade draft picks up to seven years out, which caps it at 2030. By that math, and then accounting for the Stepien rule where you cannot trade a pick in back-to-back years, by that math, the Raptors have three tradable first and the Sixers have four. I just don't know if that's true because the fact that I saw these conflicting tweets is just making me kind of second-guess myself. But obviously, that changes the situation drastically if they do have more of those picks available. But even if they do, what is to say that these teams would go all in and trade all these quote-unquote tradable picks if that is the case, that they have three and four respectively for the Raptors and the Sixers? I don't know that that motivation is there. Well, here's the question. I mean, there's a ton of motivations here, but there's one motivation or there's one restriction that the Heat don't face. So if we're talking about this from both perspectives and you work in what Dame wants, the difference between the Heat and, say, the Raptors and the Sixers, but I think particularly the Raptors, is that you're trading for a player who may not want to be there. Like, that's the difference. Like, we can talk about who has the most assets, right? OK, can the Heat put together a better package ultimately with what they can trade somewhere else and how many first-round picks they can get than, say, Toronto would? I don't know. If it's Siakam you're sending out, I have no idea why Portland would want to rebuild with Siakam now at this stage. He's younger than Dame. I guess he's a, you know, since he's a front-court player. But does that really make a lot of sense? Does it make sense to swap for Ananobi, who I know Dame kind of wanted to play with from all the reports we heard, something that Sean Hyken told us in the podcast, too. So you're swapping him for him? I mean, I don't think he wants to play with him like he wants to play with Bam. But that was one of the guys. And then, of course, the end of swapping Scotty Barnes, who seems to be, you know, again, would be duplication for some of what Portland has already, which is one of the issues. But again, the thing that those teams, and particularly a Toronto would face, is the part of trading, gutting your roster, not just for a guy who's 33 years old and is going to make $63 million in the last year of his deal, but gutting your roster for a guy who doesn't want to play for you. Like, the Heat don't have to deal with that. They know he wants to play for them. So, I mean, you don't have an issue of him coming in with a sour attitude or wondering if that's the right situation or asking out again in a year. Dame Lillard is not going to ask out for Miami in a year or two. I assume if Dame comes to Miami, he's finishing his career in Miami. Unless Portland and him have rebuilt things that maybe he wants to spend his last year there at the very end of his career. He's going to be a Heat player. I don't know he's going to be a Raptors player. Like you said, Kawhi dipped after winning a championship. And the other thing about it is that you look at that Raptors roster that Kawhi joined. We were just going through it before. It's a really good team. I mean, he basically just slotted in for DeRozan. People talk about, okay, Durant got hurt and Klay got hurt in the final. That Raptors team was championship quality, though. Like, you're talking about closer to prime Kyle, Dan Green, who is still a functional player, Kawhi, your four was Siakam, and your five was a still very, very good defensive player in Marc Gasol. And then you were bringing, what, Norm Powell, Fred VanVleet, and Serge Ibaka off your bench? Like, this Toronto team is not that. No matter who they send out or don't send out. And that was with OG Hurt. Yes, exactly. OG was your ninth guy. So, like, you're talking about, I mean, that's a high quality team. So that's the thing. Like, they sent him to San Antonio, sent him there because Pop didn't want to deal him to the Lakers. But it wasn't like Kawhi couldn't look at that situation and say, okay, I can win here. Is Dame going to look at the situation in Toronto, particularly if one of their core three or four guys, whether it's Adenobe, Siakam, or Barnes is traded? Is he going to look at what's left there and think he can win to the degree that he thinks he can win with Jimmy and Bam, with Spoh coaching? And also, Nick Nurse isn't coaching the team anymore. So they've taken, we don't know what the new coach is going to look like. So I just, to me, it's a massive risk, firm aside, to take a player who may not want to be there and may ask out. Philadelphia, Morey is a little bit different situation because he needs to justify his reputation and make a move now. And he's got the whole Harden thing. But I just can't see that as feasible unless they're going to trade Maxie. I don't know how Portland justifies that. I mean, and it doesn't look like they're going to trade Maxie. That's the thing. It's like, you know, obviously, if he would have signed the extension that he's eligible for by now, it would have made him impossible to trade at this point. But he's still technically trade eligible. I don't, like I said before, it just comes back to the team's motivation to end up going all in, right? Like why, if you're the Sixers, if you're the Raptors, are you going to put a package around, you know, whatever it is that the Blazers would want, right? Let's say they want Maxie and the four first. If they do have four first, because again, I'm not sure how many of these picks either teams have. By my count, I could be wrong. They have four tradable picks. Why are the Sixers going to do that? Why are they going to do that? There was actually a quote tweet that was going around heat Twitter yesterday. I wish I had pulled up right now where earlier when they got, when the Sixers got eliminated from the playoffs earlier this year, Dame had like quoted, I think when NB had said something after. I don't, I wish I had the tweet pulled up right now because you know, I'll laugh at the Sixers forever. It was NB basically throwing the rest of his team under the bus after. Yeah, the yearly. What he always does. I mean, different from Giannis where Giannis took responsibility, but kind of redefined failure. NB like literally threw his team under the bus again. And Dame, I don't think he wants to play for either of those teams. No, that's why I come down on it. And if, and if that's the case, you know, he's made that clear. If that's the case, why are these teams going to go all in and put together these packages, which would they would have to put together because those would be the type of packages that would be competitive and or better than the heat, right? Like if they throw in the Scottie Barnes with, with three picks, it would have to be those types of packages. Why are they going to do that? They have anything that would try to get him at value knowing that he doesn't want to play there. And also knowing, like we talked about before the age and how old he's going to be when he's making 60 million plus dollars. Like I, it would probably try to get him for value. It doesn't feel to me like what Messiah has been doing has been setting up for a dang trade. It just, it, it doesn't, I know they have a weakness of point guard because Dennis Schroeder is really good in, in international competition, but he's, he's a below average starting point guard in the NBA. I mean, he's a, he's a good player, but they haven't been setting up for this kind of move when they traded for Kawhi and we'll close here. When they traded for Kawhi, they were ready for that kind of move. They had a guy in the Rosen who was really good in the regular season, but shrunk in the playoffs. There was, there was a stat that came out around that time that to Rosen level dropped the most of any of the top 30 players in the league in the playoffs and Kawhi's went up the most. So you're swapping in Kawhi for DeRozan with what you already had. All you had, I think they gave up like a first round kick and that was it. Like that's a ready made team. Like, again, we talked about, does he want to play in Toronto or whatever? Plus Kawhi doesn't want the spotlight anyway. So Toronto was fine. Dame seems to want to increase his spotlight. He's on a Gatorade commercial. Now he's on a Modelo commercial. Now he's not doing that in Toronto. He's not, I don't think Dame wants to be the next Kyle Lowry. He wants to replace Kyle Lowry in Miami. Anyway, thanks to Alex. Appreciate it. Follow the Tropical Blanket. Follow our sponsors, Better Edge, Price Fix. We'll have more episodes for you as things develop. Yeah, I guess shame on the Heat for telling Portland to play the market. I thought that's how business works. Sleepy Pat let another one go on Kelly Oubre, unbelievable. Kelly Oubre, it's all over with now. Have a good one, everybody.