the third market
one market can't keep his shoe in stock while the other gave him away for nothing, and portland has to play him
the nike ja 3 sold 40,000 pairs on stockx this year. the man whose name is on the shoe was traded for jerami grant, kris murray, and $1 million in cash.
no picks. memphis attached money to move him along.
two markets looked at ja morant this summer and could not have disagreed more. one of them moved hundreds of thousands of searches and 26 retail colorways and a swarovski edition he wore in london. the other could not find a single team willing to give up a future first.
the trade market is a cold reader. it measures availability, and morant has played 79 games in three seasons. it measures efficiency, and his last year was a stack of career lows: 41% from the floor, 23% from three, 30% of his shots at the rim. it measures fit in a league that has moved past him, and a guard who cannot shoot and keeps getting hurt is a hard sell. so memphis sold low. grant and murray, two years of salary off the books, and the quiet relief of being done.
the sneaker market reads something else entirely. it does not care about rim frequency. ayo dosunmu wore the ja 3 every game he played. so did players who have never met him. the shoe logged 14,000 minutes of nba action on feet that belong to other people. morant himself played 20 games, and the shoe was everywhere. “online, every pair sells out,” keenan curry, a sneaker store partner, said.
the easy move is to call one market smart and the other one fooled. that misreads what the shoe is selling. the kids buying the ja 3 are not running a plus-minus model. they are buying the griddy, the dunks, the gun-on-the-live recklessness that got him suspended for 25 games, the sense of a person who has not been media-trained into paste. “regardless if he plays another minute, he sells,” curry said. that read on his personality is correct.
there is a third market, and it opened in a portland interview room in june.
micah nori was presenting how he would run the team. he had not been given health updates, so he had damian lillard coming off the bench, around 24 minutes. then he learned lillard was sitting in the room.
lillard broke the silence. “huh. 24 minutes?”
nori did not flinch. “i haven’t seen you dribble in 14 months,” he told the franchise’s all-time leading scorer. lillard, back from a torn achilles at 35, gave him the only number that mattered. “i’m fine. i’m fine.”
that is the market that decides this trade, and it prices neither availability nor charisma. it prices what happens when the ball goes up.
the game does not price him at zero. his interior passing never fell off, 90th percentile in at-rim assists last year even as everything else cratered. he still bends a defense when he drives. portland is betting that the part of him the trade market ignored, the playmaking, survives in a backcourt with lillard pulling a defense apart from the arc.
defense is the other half of the bargain. starting the two together puts two six-foot-two guards who do not defend on the same floor. the league just spent a postseason proving a team cannot carry even one of them, never mind two.
the thunder, the spurs, the knicks ran nearly every rotation through real defenders. the new game hunts the soft spot and does not stop. a big wing bullies them in isolation. denver cuts them to pieces and lets jokić find whoever comes open. the heat barely set a screen, just move and move until someone is late.
behind all of it stands donovan clingan, seven-foot-two, the last line. he runs ragged when the men in front of him wave drivers through. there is a lesson in rudy gobert’s last years in utah. a wall of below-average on-ball defenders forced one center to guard the rim and the arc at once, an impossible job, and the fans blamed the center. clingan is about to inherit that job. the portland playoff lineups already whisper it: a plus-37.5 net rating with robert williams on the floor, a minus-14 with clingan. the rim is where the cost shows up.
there is a way to soften it. stagger them. never play lillard and morant heavy minutes together, give the team 48 minutes of one scoring guard and one rim protector, and let scoot henderson share the floor with each. henderson is the no. 2 pick from 2023 who put up 70 points in his first three playoff games, a number only brandon roy and lillard have beaten as blazers. he is also the man who got erased from the depth chart the day portland bought low. the stagger is his lane and his development both.
but the stagger asks two declining stars to accept smaller roles and to compete on defense, and it asks a coach to make them. micah nori was hired on one guaranteed year, a below-market salary, and team options, a deal his peers called a slap in the face. if lillard does not like being told to guard, he can call tom dundon, who has already shown he will spend as little as the situation allows. portland has run this play before. terry stotts paired lillard with poor defenders, finished in the league’s defensive basement most years, and had one good spring to show for it.
stockx sold 40,000 pairs. memphis took no picks. the floor opens in october, and clingan is the one who pays for both.