I definitely think Portland has peaked. They are a good not great team with one great player, and have been hovering in Western Conference as a 40-50 win team for 5 years now. They are ridiculously capped out and have little cgance of getting good enough to get to the Finals for years to come.
They don't need to just trade McCollum. They need a full blown blow up and start over otherwise they are going to be stuck in NBA purgatory for another half decade.
They're a small market.
They have an active fanbase that is accustomed to being in the mix for the playoffs and having entertaining basketball to watch.
They have a franchise player who is a top 10 star in the league beloved by fans.
They have a very good coach.
They have an owner with deep pockets.
Blowing it up and starting over would mean throwing away or at least jeopardizing most of those things.
There are worse things than being a 45 win team likely to lose in the 1st round.
I think in Boston we have a tendency to assume that other teams / fanbases will see the logic in accepting that they can't contend and deciding to become irrelevant for an indefinite period of time in the hope that the next iteration of the team will have a chance to contend.
That's a lot harder to do when you're the only gig in town and your fans don't have the comfort of two decades of winning and relevance in every single major sport to keep them warm through the cold years of rebuilding.
yeah, but they can't pay the luxury tax for a team that is mediocre. They have to get salary relief and the only way they can realistically do that is trade McCollum (or Lillard). I can't see them trading Lillard so they have to move McCollum. I mean something like Hill, Smith, Clarkson, Osman, Zizic, BKN pick for McCollum, Turner, Harkless, and Leonard shaves like 8 million off of their cap this year, plus a lot more in the future. They get the BKN pick to add a top 10 pick, add Osman and Zizic as young cost controlled talent and then Smith, Clarkson and Hill for some quality players in their backcourt (Thompson could be swapped out for Smith as well if they'd rather go that route). Only McCollum of the group they are trading is any sort of difference maker. nbadraft.net has Bamba falling to 8, but whether it is him, Bridges or Carter, it is still a quality piece
So they make that trade the Blazers would look like
PG - Lillard, Clarkson
SG - Smith, Hill
SF - Aminu, Osman, Layman
PF - Bamba, Swanigan, Zizic
C - Nurkic, Collins
That team probably isn't quite as good, but has a lot better cap situation, has more young pieces, and is still a playoff level team in the West.