For three seasons, the Portland Trail Blazers have been bracing themselves for the possibility that LaMarcus Aldridge would walk in July 2015, and that potential became reality on Saturday, when Aldridge said on Twitter that he will sign with the San Antonio Spurs.
His deal will be a four-year maximum contract worth more than $80 million, with an opt-out after the third year, a source told ESPN's Marc Stein.
Aldridge had spent his first five NBA seasons in Portland in the shadow of Brandon Roy and it was an open secret that Aldridge's happiness index, even after signing a multi-year extension in October 2009, was lagging relative to other young NBA stars in their respective markets. When Paul Allen lured Neil Olshey away from the Los Angeles Clippers in 2012 to be the Trail Blazers' general manager, Olshey's first item of business was to reverse the previous six and turn Aldridge's frown upside-down.
Aldridge met twice with the Los Angeles Lakers and entertained offers from the Houston Rockets, Dallas Mavericks, Phoenix Suns, Toronto Raptors and Miami Heat before deciding on the Spurs.
The Blazers had effectively been engaged in a three-year recruiting effort, marriage counseling between team and star.
The Trail Blazers sought Aldridge's input on personnel moves and kept him in the loop during free-agent and trade pursuits. They made certain allowances that many teams make for their franchise players. They dislodged Robin Lopez from New Orleans in exchange for Jeff Withey, a future second round pick and the change from the cupholder in Allen's car because Aldridge wanted to play alongside a rim protector. And they scored with Damian Lillard in the 2012 draft, giving them the impact point guard they needed to vault above 50 wins each of the past two seasons.
In some parallel universe where Wes Matthews doesn't go down and the Trail Blazers had maintained a track to the No. 2 seed in the West this past spring, it's conceivable Aldridge would've stayed put in Portland for the next four or five seasons. Had Aldridge been sure last winter he was leaving this July, it's likely his reps would've given the Blazers a heads-up before the trade deadline so they could extract what they could in a deal, a la Phoenix and Goran Dragic. But after the team went into a tailspin and got whooped in the first round by Memphis, the writing appeared on the wall that Aldridge might look elsewhere.
The tricky part for the Portland brass was that Aldridge's departure was an uncertainty, which meant that as free agency and the draft approached, they had to build two rosters simultaneously: One predicated on Aldridge's return; the other for a post-LaMarcus world. With Aldridge in limbo, Lillard a fixture for the next several season, and Lopez and Matthews unrestricted free agents, the front office turned its attention to Nicolas Batum. Now 26, Batum was coming off the worst shooting season of his career and due to make $12.3 next season in the final year of his deal. But before moving him, the Trail Blazers needed to gauge whether doing so would influence Aldridge's decision.
The Trail Blazers determined it wouldn't, so they began to measure the marketplace for their lanky small forward. In a perfect world, they wanted a 2015 lottery pick in return for Batum. But when that wasn't available, they did what they saw as the next best thing: Trade him for a 2014 lottery pick, power forward Noah Vonleh -- a 19-year-old who as late as draft night 2014 was regarded as in the mix for the No. 4 overall pick -- and a little depth on the perimeter in Gerald Henderson.
Offseason moves are made in combination, and by the time draft night was in the books, Portland had effectively moved Batum and the No. 23 pick for Vonleh, Henderson, Mason Plumlee, a second-round pick and a little bit of cap space, too. Then early morning Eastern Time on July 1, the Trail Blazers found a prospective replacement for Batum when they signed Al-Farouq Aminu, 24, to a 4-year, $30 million deal. Aminu is coming off a season in Dallas where he established himself as a spidery wing defender with some emerging offensive skills, a potential 3-and-D forward, though the 3 still needs a little work. Olshey had drafted Aminu in Los Angeles in 2010, and Aminu name-checked the GM in a tweet as his guy soon after he agreed to terms with Portland.
As they waited for Aldridge, the Trail Blazers were getting younger by the day, with a core of under-25 players on their rookie deals. But of equal importance, the Trail Blazers still had the capacity to get the band back together -- or most of it -- should Aldridge decide that Portland, despite the gloom and remoteness, offered the best basketball situation. Only Batum, the weakest link from last season's starting five, is missing. They still held Bird rights on Matthews and Lopez, though there was a strong sense a rival team would throw an unseemly amount of money at Matthews, who will be 29 on opening night and coming off a ruptured Achilles.
Keeping Matthews and Lopez in a world without Aldridge didn't make a lot of sense. For one, the rebuild is on for the Trail Blazers, and both played their way into robust, well-deserved contracts. Second, Matthews and Lopez worked on their games diligently and maximized their potential, but each benefited from playing in an offense whose fulcrum was Aldridge -- a monster post-up threat with range who routinely commanded double-teams and could make plays out of them. Too often, a player's value is measured in a vacuum without consideration of the system in which he has performed. Rebuilding and youth movement aside, Matthews and Lopez were worth less to a Portland team without Aldridge than one with him.
Portland doesn't know exactly what its roster will look like a month from now, but it will almost certainly be populated with very young players, most of whom will be 25 or under and many of whom will be on favorable deals, and the sum of which might not win 35 games in the Western Conference. All the while, the Trail Blazers kept the porch light on for Aldridge.
Not unlike the Clippers in 2010, Olshey still has a Blake Griffin in Lillard, a young supernova around whom the next rebuild begins. Meanwhile, the front office can take solace in the fact that it was forces largely beyond its control that propelled Aldridge to San Antonio and that, two seasons ago, they advanced to the second round for the first time since the Clinton administration.
But this is what lemonade tastes like in the Pacific Northwest, where the Trail Blazers tried mightily to unwind that clock but ran out of time.