As far as the Portland trade, it's really pretty easy. Ingles to POR, Bogey/O'Neale/Clarkson/Conley somewhere else for a 1st, that first goes to POR. The Jazz could have traded any of those players for Roco and Powell and improved greatly. The Jazz could have also traded two of those players for Roco and Powell and gotten better. Could they have gotten a first for one of those players? I have a strong feeling because we did trade one of those players for a 1st and that trade could have been easily executed back then. There would have been more incentive for BKN to trade a first last year than when they did this summer. Royce could have easily been looped into the Harden deal which happened within a week of the Powell/Covington deal.
Oh and by the way, this is just one example of something that "did" happen. The reason why I brought this up as an example was a counter to the idea that the Jazz tried so hard to get better but they just couldn't find a deal to improve. I don't think that was the case. Go back to when the trade was made, I promise you I was not the only one thinking this. It's hard for me to believe that we did everything we could, but just couldn't find anything to help us. That's actually why we're talking about Roco/Powell btw. It was about the trade market at the time. There were several players who were in trade rumors all year that could have helped us. Roco/Powell is just the most concrete example of a trade for two players, who were perfect for us, that went for very little. Maybe you think this particular trade was implausible for UTA to execute....are we now convinced we tried really hard to do something but couldn't? Eh....I'm skeptical.
I mean, if we're being realistic about that Powell/Roco trade, the number one reason why we wouldn't do it is because we didn't want to take on a ton of future salary. I could totally see that, and aligns into my theory that Ainge/FO was favoring the "blow it up" option already. I think it's likely we were leaning that direction, and thus we were protecting the future cap situation/picks very closely. It's fine....but it is a damn shame that we could never give Don/Rudy a legitimate shot to win. Those guys were so good and we wasted it with years of inaction.