I’m officially hooking myself up to Hearsky’s Bobby Portis bandwagon. Before you all give me valid reasons as to why it will never happen, please allow me to wax poetic as to why it could and should happen.
Why it should happen:
- This Jazz team needs an enforcer with attitude IN THE WORST WAY! We’ve been missing it since Crowder left. I’ll also go 1 step further and declare that if the Jazz could have somehow done the Conley deal without having to move Crowder, we’re in the Finals this year and we probably beat Denver last year. Portis would bring that attitude back in spades.
- He’s a 6’10” dude who can play the hell out of the Stretch 5. He IS our answer for when teams wanna get cute and go small ball on our asses. Shot a whopping 47% from 3 last year and has been reliable from 3 over the course of his career.
- When looking at what went wrong against the Clippers, I’m hard pressed to find a single player that would help the Jazz’s weaknesses more than Mr. Bobby Portis Jr.
Why it could happen:
- Dude just declined a player option with the Bucks that would have paid him a mere $3.6 mil. With the Bucks cap situation, they could throw their mid-level at him which will still leave him short of $5 mil/per. Bobby wants to return to the Bucks, but the outside market is just gonna put too much money on the table for him to walk away from.
- While money will almost certainly keep him from returning to Milwaukee, it’s hard to fathom Portis signing with any non-contender at this point. That being said, with most of the legit contenders being as cash strapped as we are, it levels the playing field a bit for the Jazz.
- If there’s enough interest to acquire Portis via a sign and trade, Utah has a $5 mil trade exception from the Ed Davis trade that expires on August 6th. If it takes more than $5 mil, we also have the brand new Favors trade exception that’s just over $9 mil.
- If we sign him outright, we’ve got the taxpayer exception to work with. Honestly, I don’t think any of the contenders are gonna spend $9 mil on Portis but the Jazz could if they wanted to. Hell, even if the Jazz threw him an offer in the $6-7 mil range, it keeps Portis with a contender and looks a lot better than the $3.6-4.5 mil that the Bucks would be able to pay him.
There’s been more than 1 Portis/Utah rumor over the last couple of offseasons and it definitely seems like there’s a little smoke there. Probably to the point in which these 2 camps have had some discussions before and have both considered the scenario in the past. I don’t think it’s as big of a pipe dream as one might think at first glance. I’m gonna go ahead and keep my hopes up on this one.
