I'm So SICK & TIRED of Neil Olshey

Yeah West was involved with some of the Lakers titles, building a decent team in Memphis (and then gifting Pau to the Lakers, even though Marc turned out pretty good), and is credited with a big reason why the Warriors won a title.

 

I think in most situations a GM needs time to do his thing, but at some point if it's not working it's just not working. Maybe 6 years isn't enough? I realize they had a major rebuild after LMA left, but it's been a bit of a broken record the last 3 years, yes this was their best overall year in terms of record, and their defense got a lot better, but it still was kind of the same year.

Overall to me though, if NO is going to get up and tell us everything is going according to his plan every time he's up there talking then it seems like he can take the blame when it doesn't go well, and I really hope part of his plan is winning the 1st round next year.

 

That's what you think Olshey said? No wonder you hate him, ha ha. He specifically said the end of the season was "disappointing" and "stunning". Please tell me where he said everything is going according to his plan? Saying he wasn't going to overreact to one playoff series and that they are in year 3 of a 5 year rebuild isn't saying that he was okay with what happened or that it's exactly what should've happened. Most of the rest of his statement was about the roster needing to improve and that it wasn't a finished project.

The rebuild got off course from the beginning because in my opinion he was a little too good at his job for the team to be really terrible and because any team with Dame (and CJ) is going to win some games and we ended up losing our 1st round pick in 2016 because of it. That is not good for any rebuilding team to not have a draft pick (see Nets the last few years, Lakers this year, and Kings next year). I truly believe he thought that pick was going to turn into two 2nd round picks because it was lottery protected.

For me I look more at if the future projected core gets better each year in a rebuild. It's difficult enough to add one good core piece every year and is very rare to add more than one. So lets look at it from the way I look at it:

Year 1: Dame and CJ with average talent around them in Aminu, Plumlee, and Harkless (who still has a small chance of being a good core piece, albeit not a huge chance).

Year 2: Added Turner which was a bad move and didn't help the core. Added Nurkic during the season which bailed out not adding a core piece during the summer. So now the core is Dame, CJ, and Nurk.

Year 3: Added Collins and Swanigan. The hope is that the core is now Dame, CJ, Nurk, and Collins. Unless Olshey really believed they were going into year 3 of a rebuild I don't really get the Collins pick. This to me signifies he was thinking long term instead of quick fixes, which I also like in any GM.

So for me each year he has added a potential core piece. This summer is the breaking point for me. He has the Crabbe TPE, the Vonleh TPE, the 24th pick, the tax-MLE, and trades. He has to turn one of those into a 5th core piece and the other current core pieces besides Dame need to solidify themselves as core pieces. That is why I don't think simply trading CJ for a SF necessarily does much but shift the positions of the core. However getting a package say of Love and the #8 pick gives us two potential core pieces if that makes sense. Not building on the core this summer will kill any chance this team has. As long as a core piece is added each year then I will not turn on him though.

 

Why does NO not get any blame for LMA leaving, but gets the credit for bringing in players after he left. Obviously LMA got to make his own choice, but NO’s job was to convince him to stay, which he didn’t. The major rebuild the Blazers has to do was because NO didn’t do a good job of figuring out a way to convince LMA to stay.
In NO’s exit interview he talks about Stotts did a good job this season the defense got better, but at the start when he’s talking about the playoffs talks about the other teams coach got to play them 4 times, well didn’t Stotts also have 4 games to figure it out and didn’t?
NO spent most of his press conference saying that the 4 games in the post season weren’t much to judge off of, it was just a bad match up vs a super star! Sure he was disappointed, but he came off very defensive, and like basically we should ignore the playoffs and think about the 82 game regular season more.
He has said a few times that the Blazers rebuild is ahead of schedule, and so the expectations are too high, like really who says that in sports? Oh you guys are just expecting to much out of us cause we’re young (the 4th youngest(?)), NO has neglected bringing in any veteran leadership to the team, something almost every successful team has.

I pretty much agree with your conclusion paragraph, hopefully this summer somehow they find a good piece to put in there and the young guys keep improving.

 

Aldridge left because of his daughter. We actually offered him more money than the Spurs and he said no. He claimed that he wanted to be closer to his daughter who lived in Houston.

 

I understand that Aldridge made a personal decision for himself, but in the end NO's job is to convince players to play here isn't it? I mean I get it, it's not all NO's fault, if a guy is gonna leave there is only so much he can do about it. Who knows if a better GM could've convinced him to stay or not we won't ever know. It sounds like LMA was kind of on his way out the 2nd half of that season, but it also sounds like it was a hard decision for him, and if he was calling last year to come back it doesn't sound like he was fleeing Portland, because he just didn't want to be here.
All in all I get that NO has a hard job, and maybe I'm just too hard on him because I think he's kind of a... jerk(?) ego-maniac? I don't know, he just rubs me the wrong way. I won't be the first person to dislike NO at least in part because of his personality... I keep saying it, but I'd be thrilled if next year the Blazers had a better post-season and you guys are piling on my idiot self for how wrong I was about NO's abilities and the direction of the team.

 

Harkless and Aminu can guard 4 positions. Collins has that potential as well. We're halfway there. They don't have Dame. If Brad Stevens can make IT a nearly 30ppg scorer and effective in the playoffs, imagine what he could do with Dame and CJ. Nurkic has passing potential, I think Stevens would bring it out of him. Our roster is underrated by our fans, and our coach is overrated.

 

Which is why he picked Pheonix over us....

 

Dame needs help. It's that simple. And not just in the playoffs. Some help during the regular season so he'll be a little fresher for the playoffs would be great. It's on Olshey to make that happen.

 

He needs help from Stotts too.

 

The blame for Aldridge leaving is 100% on Aldridge. He's the most unstable player I've ever seen. He changes his mind daily and he's like that on the Spurs too so it's not just a Blazers thing. He lied and said he would sign an extension in the off season. The whole organization bent over backwards to make sure he was happy. Every single employee had to walk on eggshells around him because he would turn the smallest things into lifetime grudges. That season and Aldridge leaving ended the day Wes got hurt. Olshey was building a contender around Aldridge and he bailed because waah waah waah Lillard is getting too much attention. Fuck him. Even he himself admitted he should've stayed.

The veteran thing is a good point. I think Turner was supposed to be that veteran. I was kind of hoping they would've made a trade for Vince Carter or someone like that last year. They had Gerald Henderson the 1st year of this rebuild.

 

Every night I open the S2 main page and I see this thread title with the last poster named. It's always Hoopsjock. Here's how the line looks tonight. Only the number ever changes.

I'm So SICK & TIRED of Neil Olshey Replies:690 hoopsjock

He makes half the posts in the thread, and won't take guff from anyone. You gotta admire his Don Quixotic tenacity in taking on the majority opposed to him. It's his way or the highway.

When he needs help, his 2 O-Live comrades jump in, whatever their names are. I just learned that this poor beaten-up guy Tortured is also from O-Live, but he's not like them. He's their punching bag they brought along. They packed everything they needed.

 

I see once again you can't have a civil discussion so you resort to your stupid tactics of attacking the poster instead of the post. Good job

 

Speak of the Devil, he was lurking! Okay I'll stop posting so you can keep your name at the top of the board.

 

Also, if he had a feeling there was a chance he would leave, he should have traded him. Indiana and Sacramento did that with George and Cousins and it paid off.

 

Here's another thing I didn't like, they had / have all these young bigs and fired Kim Hughes because he told the truth. It's pretty clear that Leonard's progression kind of stopped there.
The thing with Aldridge is this. If you have a player that's being a malcontent to the extent that it's eating the entire organization up, your GM has to have the wherewithal to pull that guy aside and say look, we appreciate you as a player but if you cant figure this out we're trading you. Or make the coach do it, but Stotts has never seemed like the type of coach that is going to really push his players or be in there face.
To me all those things you said about what the organization did for over year because of Aldridge makes the GM look bad! I get that your stars rule the league, but Aldridge while a top tier PF wasn't exactly Lebron. If Aldridge's attitude was as bad as reported that year, they should have traded him
not just because he might leave but because very few guys are worth it when they're that much of a problem.
I get it that him leaving was his own choice, but I think NO did a bad job as the boss of the organization the year leading up to that.

Maybe I didn't quite understand it, but from what I heard they let Henderson go because they thought turner was basically the same player but a couple years younger. Which if that's the case, I just don't get it. Henderson was also like half the price of Turner already had experience with Stotts and the system, had become a mentor for some of the guys.

 

You must really be all in on the fire Holt and Pops because SA has been a shitstorm this year - they can't even get their guy to play, let alone stay with the organization.

 

That's weak... Like crazy weak, Pops has how many rings? compared to Olshey having as many as you and I...

 

I'm going to try to find it, but I read an article (or maybe I made it up in my head heh), that showed them as statistically very similar players, and the Blazers wanted turner because of his youth, and didn't offer Henderson anything.