I have seen a lot of chuckling both here and in the national media about the rumor that the Blazers were trying to trade for Bam Adebayo: "What’s Portland thinking? Miami’s never trading Bam! And he wouldn’t even put them over the top, especially given the likely cost!"

I think Portland’s front office never thought that their offer would be taken seriously but did it to improve their leverage in any Dame trade discussion.

Because the package Portland could offer for Bam (#3/Scoot, Simons, Sharpe, Little, picks) far exceeds what Miami is likely to put forth initially for Dame, and probably even exceeds their best possible offer. So point of putting out a Bam offer tangible and specific enough to justify a press leak (and think about it, this was a really WTF leak out of the blue) is to be able to look at Pat Riley and say, "Why should we take less from you for Dame, a superior player, than you would take from us for Bam, an inferior player?" It creates a critical amount of what Nate Duncan calls "internal leverage" to counter the fact that any Dame trade market will have precious little "external leverage" since it’s pretty much just Miami and Brooklyn in the mix.

I think this shows that they won’t take 75 cents on the dollar for the franchise’s signature player and makes it far more likely that Dame plays the season with Portland, unless Miami blinks hard at the trade deadline in February.