Most BE fans and readers have enough knowledge and common sense to understand that signing Grant is much more beneficial to the Blazers than letting him walk. If you still have reservations about giving Jerami the bag, I encourage you to go back to the 2015 off-season when Olshey let Aldridge walk for nothing and see how that worked out for Portland.

While I think Grant is an all-around forward who fits the Blazers pretty well, his most glaring deficiencyhasto be addressed - rebounding.

Using Josh Hart as the de facto rebounding forward had moments when it worked for last year's roster. He's no longer on the team though and the issue still stands. Even if Cronin finds a SF with some rebounding chops, that's banking heavily on a nightly average performance to soak up numbers in that category. If that player were to get injured (knock on wood they don't), that leaves the team in a really bad spot. One way to potentially solve this issue is to bake some contingencies into Jerami's new contract.

Performance bonuses (PB's) in NBA contracts can take up to a maximum of 15% of a player's seasonal salary. If Joe is clever here, he can leverage some bonus's into Grant's contract that require him to average a certain amount of rebounds per game. I would construct the PB's something like this:

7% bonus for averaging 7.5 rebounds per game.

3% bonus for averaging 1.5 offensive rebounds per game.

Based on Jerami's highest averages of 1.3 ORB's and 5.2 TRB's during his career, I think the performance bonus percentages I proposed are fair, give or take a little. Whatever the numbers work out to be, I believe Cronin absolutely has to do this if the plan is to compete with Dame still on the roster. If he doesn't it'll be just one more way teams can pick the Blazer's apart.