"If they're so bad"??? Give me a break. Are Blake and Kaman the guys you wanted to add to the roster this summer? Of course not. They weren't on any of our radars, and for good reason.
People reacted to Lopez signing last year with a lot of pessimism. Maybe we should give Olshey a little benefit of the doubt?
I wanted Blake and Kaman. Tell me how we managed to steal them away from every other team in the league.
Blazers have one of the top starting 5 in the NBA. The weakness was clearly the bench. Many of the most coveted bench players this off season have gone for stupid money. Do we give up a starter or gut the bench for a Frye or Livingston? Do you really think we should have cleared players and money for Lebron? Melo? Bosh? Lebron's people have only taken meetings with Miami and Cleveland. Houston has money to get him, Lebron's people wouldn't even give them the time of day? Did you really want to give up Wes and Batum for Bosh? Then what? Bosh is great but we have LMA. I don't see how Bosh, LMA, Lillard, scrub and Lopez is a viable lineup. Wade maybe? Is Wade better than Wes and Batum? I don't see it. So who exactly should the Blazers have gone after?
It became abundantly clear after the first 48 hours of free agency that we weren't going to be able to afford some of the names that we were discussing a month ago. Channing freaking Frye got $8 million per year. So no, those two were not on my radar originally, but I also accepted that the market was saturated with teams desperate to spend their free cap space. Go look at some of the contracts that were handed out. Do you really think Chandler Parsons is worth over $15 million per year? Would you have paid Marcin Gortat $60 million over five years? Gordon Hayward is getting paid $15.75 million per year with the Bobcats. What do you think shooter?
What's so wrong with the team right now? Bringing in an all-star would require gutting the team. A young up and coming team that has great chemistry. Why is another all-star required? At any rate free agency started yesterday, so getting all upset about anything at this point is just weird.
You're wasting your time shooter. Anything you say will be shot down. Got to like Kaman and Blake or you aren't being real. Go figure . . . Hibbert . . . can't do it Gortat . . . can't do it Wade . . . can't do it Livingston . . . not good Thomas . . . can't do it Nelson . . . not worth it Ariza . . . can't do it You can name every player except Kaman and Blake and will be told no way Blazers can get them, they aren't worth it or they are a bad fit. The only players that make sense for the Blazers are Kaman and Blake.
OK let's play your game. What should Dallas do instead of Chandler? Don't just say overpaid, come up with alternatives
You want names only to shoot it down or laugh at. I'm laughing at your theory that you need alternatives. Tell you what, pay me 100's of thousands of dollars and I'll give you names. (Like any message board post is going to figure this shit out.) Until then we are all free to judge the moves the Blazers make without coming up with alternatives. Your alternatives theory is a joke to some of us.
I think Chandler Parsons is an amazing player, and would have been a great addition. I also think Gortat is a helluva lot better than Kaman. And Gordon Hayward is a clear upgrade over Blake. Would they have come to Portland? I don't know. Are they worth the money? I don't know that, either, but I know that three NBA teams thought they were. Sometimes you have to overspend to get good talent.
They traded for him.... Why do you keep bringing up other teams? We're talking about the Portland Trail Blazers and the resources that they had to acquire new talent this summer. You claimed that I have a reading comprehension problem, but it's like you're not following my point at all. You walk into a store. You have a 5 dollar bill and the mythical 3 dollar bill. That's all you have. You don't have a credit card. You don't have any checks. You have exactly 8 dollars that you can spend. You need some hamburger and some milk. You don't have enough money to buy the organic hamburger meat, so you have to settle for the regular stuff. Now you only have $3 left, but again, you don't have enough for the organic milk, so you have to buy the regular milk. You needed hamburger meat and milk, and that's exactly what you got, but you didn't get the milk and meat you really wanted because... guess what... you didn't have enough money. Then again, I guess you could just not buy any milk or meat and just figure out what you're going to make for dinner with what's in the pantry.
Same story, different summer. Good teams aren't built overnight. Not in a small market cold weather city anyway.
You could probably be a pretty good curler though which gymnasts probably would suck at so there's that
Okay, so now you have to make a trade that Houston will agree to because you don't have the cap space to offer him that contract outright. So now you have to match $15 million in salaries. Are you going to trade Batum? How about Wes? We don't have a lot of big contracts on the books right now. How exactly are you going to add those players?
Exactly right. None of us are Olshey--and none of us can stay on top of every player situation and contract, know who really wants to change teams, know all the agents and what they are saying about their clients, and keep our ear to the ground to catch all the scuttlebutt that is flying around the league at any given moment. That's what Olshey gets paid for. I recall that Bob Whitsitt made some amazing and very creative deals to bring very talented players to Portland. Not every deal worked out, certainly, but he found ways to make things happen. That's what I was hoping would happen this summer.
I'm not sure the weather plays such a huge role, since A: they play indoors and B: they travel most of the season and C: most of the league has similar crappy weather during the season.
If you think Portland is a cold weather city, you haven't been around much. Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, New York, Philly.....now those are some cold weather cities.
