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The Heat Check was just a craky the best podcast covering all the trauma around the association. All right, moving on, We're gonna be dealing with the aftermath of the Dame Willer trade for years to come.
A year.
The amount of impact this had on the full league is wild. We can't even see it yet, but in the immediate aftermath, we've got bad blood people. We have got a straight up cold war in the media between Dame.
And the Blazers.
It was no love loss.
When Dame put out his letter to Portland and Joe Cronin was not in it, it was not.
A thank you to Joe.
Because there have been two detailed breakdowns of the trade, and they were published within twenty four hours of each other. The first one was Chris Haynes that include did a lot of details directly from Dame.
And his agent Aaron Goodwin.
And then we got another one from woj which could have been written with full access to Joe Cronin's moleskin notebook and colored markers. And I'm dead ass serious because that was in the story. Two sides of the same story how the Dame trade happened, painting completely different narratives.
Let's start with what.
Chris Haynes dropped and Dame story.
Chris Haynes inside the messy divorce between Dame Lillard and the Portland Trailblazers.
Woo, that headline is just right there.
You'd know what's happening right dropped on Bleacher Report Friday night, and it does Thursday night, Thursday night, and it does nothing to try and hide how up set Dame was by all.
This and how it went down. And as a.
Quick aside, I love Haynes, good dude.
He is as close to Dame as any NBA reporter has ever been to a superstar player since the days of like Ahmad Rashad and Michael Jordan. So you know that this tea is directly from Dame. Here are the cliff notes of the Haynes story. One Dame was blindsided by the trade Milwaukee. He was on the phone with Haynes when the news dropped and all he could all he could say was I gotta wrap my mind around this, over and over and over again.
Since July.
Another thing in the piece, the Blazers refused to talk with the Miami Heat at all, which is contrary to many media reports. They hadn't spoken since summer league. No wonder why Barry Jackson is pissed because people were lying all summer. They picked up the phone, asked for BAM. When Bam was not available, they said, thank you, good night, We're moving on. Next up Goodwin Aaron Goodwin, Dame's agent, pressured the Blazers to trade Dame to Miami anyway and.
Did everything that he could to make it happen.
He admits to this and thinks that that was the right move.
For approximately two weeks, because of all this Cold War status causing text to the Blazers from Damon, Goodwin went unanswered, completely ghosted them. Dame and his team let leak the fact that Dame was basically asked to sit the final ten games of the season, which is just an absolute no no.
They're just literally trying to get the Blazers fined for tanking.
Somebody pick up the phone and snitch on Adam Silver Snitch snitch anyway. Dame also said if he couldn't go to Miami, so he reports the camp. Dame or reports back to the facility starts training, and he's like, Hey, if you can't trade me to Miami, then I want to rescind my trade request. What wasn't in the Ayin's piece was that he really didn't want to rescind his trade request. He mostly just wanted to give him more time to get the money Miami deal done.
And Joe said, I don't know about.
That, playboy.
No, the time for the trade request being rescinded is over. There's no going back. And Dame apparently was heartsick about this. Also, Joe Cronin apparently was not talking to Dame when he went back to the facility and started getting up shots with the guys.
Everybody was excited.
To see Dame. Joe Cronan would not speak to him.
Dame's very upset about that. Goodwin told Dame privately.
On September seventeenth, Hey, we need to start looking into some other teams. It doesn't look like Miami's avenue. Even though he was amping up the public pressure saying that Dame will not report anywhere but Miami. If Dame goes anywhere, he will ask for a trade somewhere else.
Only after the league intervened.
According to Goodwin did Cronan begin communicating again. They had to have a group call to be like, hey, it's get spicy between you two.
You guys need to figure it out.
And Lollard, as a result of all of this, has a very sour taste in his mouth about how it all went down.
A lot to unpack here, but the bottom line is that the Miami Heat.
Were never an option for Dame. It just never was gonna happen. And Aaron Goodwin worked over time to create a miss and disinformation campaign distributed by the Heat in particular as well as select media members to try and force Portland to do something that they were never going to do. Heat fans, I told you this, that deal with garbage. Portland was never going to accept it. Tyler hero is not enough with a couple of picks and a couple of young players for Dame. Lollard, But you
came for me. You came for me, and the logic was sound. And now where you at, now, where you at?
Now? Where you at now? Sad? That's where you are.
That's where you are probably enjoying a beach somewhere because it's nice there, probably not paying steak tags.
I Digress twenty four hours.
Though after Haines dropped the article, the Blazers front office responded in the form of booh.
This is the bomb. This is the sound of the Wojes bomb.
Doesn't see, we don't see. Adrian war Janowski drop articles full length Ramona Shelbourne style articles very often, but when he does, when he does, they are spicy, and this one was spicy. His story was inside the Damian Lillard trade, how the Bucks, Blazers and Sons got to the finish line, very detailed look into how the Blazers and Bucks and Son's perspective was.
How it came to become a reality. Here are the bullet points.
First up, the Bucks were.
In on the trade immediately after Damian Lillard requested out.
That's crazy.
Remember, it was like, Oh, nobody else wants this deal to happen, but Miami, Miami's the only offer.
Year of gonna get no no.
John Horse jam of the Bucks immediately called Joe Cronin and was like, hey, I got a deal. He told Cronan the day Dame demanded a trade that he was very interested.
But made Cronin swear to not leak.
Anything to anyone, especially to use Drew Holiday to raise the price with other teams. Hey don't use me as a stocking horse, bitch, or I'm fucking out.
Okay, That's basically what it was.
Because from John Horse's perspective, if I get Janis upset with me when he's already sprinkling in.
Little tea, leaves that he might leave the team.
And Drew Holliday, who's like his brother, gets wind that he was in the trade talk and then we don't trade him.
Oh yeah, we are fucked.
Horse made it known if the news got out that the Bucks would bail immediately, which is why.
Speaking of which, John Horse.
Did not inform Jannis at all of the trade d tales to get his approval, did it even floated his way until it was finished, because he did not want to upset Giannis over Drew being traded. That is a big balls GM, big boy move. Cronan another detail from
the piece. Cronan was determined from the beginning to get the best deal for Portland, not Dame, but still wanted to do right by Dame and died, and the secrecy of the deal meant that Cronan not only could not trust anyone, especially Dame and his agent, who he knew
was going to try to sour the deal. He wasn't going to tell, hey, Dame, we've got a potential deal for you to go to Milwaukee, because by that point you start doing a little mass school and you know that Drew Holidays in the deal, and then you start floating that out and now you're fucked, right, So they didn't tell Dame or Dame's agent because they knew they
were going to try to blow the deal up. They even had the framework of the deal in place and couldn't tell Phoenix who the young player they were getting from the other team was because they didn't want them
to blow up the deal either. They gave him the salary of the player and the type of player he was, and they narrowed it down to like Grayson Allen, Victor Oladipo, and I think one more So, Phoenix had to trust Joe Cronin that he wasn't gonna screw him, and guess what he didn't, because when he told them, Hey, the deal's done and the player getting is Grace Allen, they.
Were like absolutely done.
Yes.
Remember, rumors were that Phoenix wanted to trade Jay Crowder to Milwaukee for Grayson Allen and Milwaukee wouldn't do it. And the cutest little piece of reporting was that Cronan that Adrian Originowski found.
I don't know why this even came out, but it didn't. I thought it was worth mentioning.
Is that Cronan wouldn't even write down any potential offers, any whiteboard, anything that anyone could see passing by. So he wrote down all of this stuff in his life little moleskin notebook with a blue marker, So now the Drew trade was in green marker.
The whole thing's wild.
The amount of access to the Asian Wojanowski had to Joe Cronin.
Kind of.
Substantiates what people in Miami were saying about woj being someone on the inside of the Blazers camp kind of doing their bidding. But at the same time, Barry Jackson and Aaron Finchers were doing Miami's bidding, so I guess it balances out. The bottom line, though, is that the Bucks were the best option for Dame from the beginning, but if a peep got out, the deal was off, which makes all the sense in the world. And who knows what Dominoes would have fallen because of a busted
last minute trade. Right, and guess what now we know Joe Cronin it's jover trader. Joe can keep a secret in the world of NBA front offices. That's gonna go a long way. Paging Sam Presty, Paging Sam Presty. Milwaukee Bucks and veiled Dame. On Saturday, they had a big like Dame is a rye in Milwaukee, to which people were there apparently said Dame arrived late by three hours.
He carried his twins in arm, one in each arm. He couldn't glad hand on the way in, really couldn't you know?
Elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist to the crowd, and people were making a massive deal out of it.
They said, Oh, Dame's not exactly happy.
Oh, not at the same level as DeAndre Ayton when he walked into the team's facility. Some people are already wondering whether he'll ever be happy in Milwaukee. A lot of the conspiracies floating out and about about Damian Lillard and his arrival to Milwaukee.
Let me just tell you from my perspective, though, did not love seeing him in a Milwaukee hoodie.
Did not love seeing a Damian Lillard jersey in Milwaukee. Did not like it.
Did not like it. It made me sick.
But what's not to be happy about, though, Dame, You thought you were going to a place with beautiful scenery, sunny and hot weather year round.
You got eleven it's popping.
You got a robust beach and nightlife.
No state taxes, and instead you are still going to a contender, but you're going to a place where the average temperature in January is like sixteen degrees. The number one dance club in the city probably charges a five dollars cover fee.
The state bird is the Mosquito.
And instead of batties on the beach, you got fatties in triple down fat coats. I wasn't supposed to say that, wait I did, of course, Dame is.
Of course he's salty. You know what fixes that up? Fixes it right up?
Money and winning.
You don't even probably have to go outside.
You can go from car to car, garage to garage, you can go from facility to condo. Because he's not gonna live in a house. Milwaukee fans think that Damian Lillard's moving to Milwaukee.
He's not.
But he wasn't able to do any of that enough winning to keep himself happy.
And he's gonna do all a hell of a lot of that in Milwaukee.
And we know Dame's gonna live in Portland during the summer, where it's beautiful and amazing and never rains and it's sunny all the time. But it personally breaks my heart to know that Dame wanted to come back to Portland when it became obvious Miami didn't have any chance to get him. But it must have broken Joe Cornin's heart to tell him, no, I'm sorry, you can't fly home, baby.
It's a rap for you. Fly away, baby, bird, fly away.
I'm crying in the club. I did cry when I read my Damian Luller's letter to Portland.
Cried on the air. Yeah, I did, he said, Hopefully I can. I'm about to cry again. Hopefully I can return back to a Blazer's uniform.
And by then you'll forgive me for breaking your heart.
As I did my own. Woo, my goodness.
If you don't think this hurt Joe, you don't know anything about him. He's been working with the Blazers since two thousand and eight. He was close to Dame before this, He's really worked hard to do right by Dame, put the team's interest first, and he succeeded well. End this episode and hopefully never have to talk about this again with Dames goodbye. In a very long note, Dame thanked a huge list of people from Jody Allen on down, of course, not Joe Cronin, and he ended it with
this soliloquy. I think I mentioned it just a second ago. As this chapter of my life ends, I look back and realize how special it was. Even in this moment, I feel sad we never accomplished what I so badly wanted to. I don't cry much, but I know my love for you is real, because I'm for sure dropping some tears right now. Rip City, you know my heart and where I stand because I've stood there for over a decade.
So to have to move off my square hurts my heart.
As my guy Chief says, one man, don't stop, no show, and the show in Rip City must go on without me. I do believe a day will come where I put on a Blazer's uniform again, and hopefully by then I'll be forgiven for breaking your hearts along with.
My own I'm not crying. You're crying, Damn man.
Why do you have to do us like that? Don't even write that letter. Just go be the villain, Just go moving on. You've heard my take on the dame situation. Now get ready for.
The Miami point of view.
Miami resident and friend of the show, Jonathan Zaslow of the Zaslow two point zero podcast is a dedicated heat fan. Damn damn man got me crying my damn podcast, and he joined me and the crew on bet MG in the Night to let me know how Miami reacted to the Dame. To Miami News, I was joined by my co host Ryan Horvaugh and Nick Ashew. As always, let's get right into it.