https://theathletic.com/3008367/202...-the-roster-and-that-could-mean-taking-risks/ Across the NBA, general managers have become like sharks, circling the Trail Blazers roster. “They smell blood in the water,” said Blazers interim general manager Joe Cronin. In the wake of Neil Olshey’s firing for violating the team’s code of conduct, and in the fallout from a disheartening 11-15 start, one can’t blame the rivals for thinking it’s time to feed off the Blazers’ misfortune. But Cronin on Thursday painted a much different picture to The Athletic. The Blazers are not yet dead. Not even close. Cronin says the Blazers are not embarking on a rebuild. They are not going to tweak around the margins. And they will not maintain the status quo. He plans to “enhance” the current roster. “The organization wants to win,” Cronin said. “There are times when you have to take a step back in order to make a step forward, and we are not convinced that this is that time yet. Our approach today is not a re-tool or a rebuild. It’s an enhance. We haven’t discussed one time about taking a step back.” He inherits an unbalanced roster — with four guards and one small forward in coach Chauncey Billups’ nine-man rotation — and one that struggles with defense. Perhaps more concerning are issues of heart and motivation, as Billups has questioned whether all of his players have the competitive fire and want-to found in champions. Cronin has some trade chips with which to work. Starting power forward Robert Covington and starting center Jusuf Nurkic are in the final years of their contract, making them attractive to teams who want to shed salary. CJ McCollum is a top 30-45 player in the league who makes over $31 million a season. And Anfernee Simons and Nassir Little are two up-and-coming talents. Teams have been calling, Cronin said. As opposed to Olshey, who was more apt to err on the side of caution while keeping an eye on sustained success, Cronin sounds more willing to be aggressive, unafraid to take risks. “We have a stable group who can win a good amount of ball games,” Cronin said. “Taking risk means you might increase your downside … but also give you an opportunity to raise your ceiling. Those are the (trades) I’m most interested in. I’m OK missing on a trade if I thought it gave us a good chance to bump up to a whole another level. I’m OK taking a step back when we are taking a swing.” The Blazers think Cronin, 45, is the right man to take that swing. Over the last decade of Trail Blazers basketball, every big decision regarding the roster has included one consistent voice: Cronin. When Kevin Pritchard was GM, Cronin became involved in high-level basketball meetings, where he was pressed for salary cap answers. As part of being in the room for those discussions, Cronin would have a vote on free agents, trades, and draft picks. “We started putting Joe in all the meetings and testing him about cap stuff,” Pritchard said. “What happens in this scenario? What happens if this happens? And it was incredible how fast he learned it. Incredible.” Years later, when Olshey took over in 2012, he, too, became impressed with Cronin. Soon, Olshey empowered Cronin to initiate trade talks, recruit free agents, negotiate contracts and build summer league and training camp rosters. And again, at the long table where the big decisions are made, Cronin had a vote. It didn’t matter if the general manager was Pritchard, Chad Buchanan, Rich Cho or Olshey, Cronin wasn’t afraid to go against the grain with his opinion. And he developed a reputation for valuing players with upside over a safer, more vanilla prospect. In other words, he would rather draft a raw 19-year old than a solid but unremarkable five-year college senior. So today, as Cronin takes over as interim general manager, he does so without hesitation. “I was built for this,” Cronin said. When he says that, it is devoid of ego, but still, it’s jarring. During his 15-plus years working for the Blazers, Cronin has been so mild-mannered, so not about himself, that it is odd to hear his confidence on display. But when you hear his story, you’ll understand why he is so sure of himself. With the Blazers, he has done it all. Long before Pritchard called on him with a salary cap question, and long before he was trusted enough to take tasks off Olshey’s plate, Cronin was alone in a back room, stuffing books into a filing cabinet. Since he could remember, Cronin wanted this job. “When I was a kid and people asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I would say NBA general manager,” Cronin said. He played basketball, and as a hulking, 6-foot-6 big man who couldn’t shoot but loved to pass, he was good enough to earn all-state honors in Colorado at Horizon High. He found himself drawn to stories about the Denver Broncos’ mastery of the salary cap as they separated themselves from other NFLfranchises, and as he listened to the NBA Draft on the radio, he began thinking about players, contracts and how they all fit together. At age 30, having just completed his graduate degree in sports management from the University of Denver, Cronin hooked on with the Blazers. He started at the Blazers doing the most mundane of grunt work — requesting media guides from colleges, then, when they arrived in the mail, filing them. Three months later, he started helping the Blazers scouts with anything they needed — media reports on prospects and updates on which college players and NBA players were playing well. The whole time, Pritchard was keeping an eye on him. There was something Pritchard sensed during Cronin’s interview for the internship, and he wanted to see if he was right. “When you are hiring people, one of the things you try to vet quickly is what are their true emotions of why they are doing this,” Pritchard said. “Is it because of the money, the glamor, the whatever … and with Joe, it was apparent he had a pure basketball heart. He loves the game. For me, it stood out.” So after Cronin was hired, Pritchard watched how he handled the mundane assignments. “One of the first things I do is see if they are over themselves,” Pritchard said. “Is this job going to be about them? Or is it going to be about the job and doing it right? Joe came in and was the lowest maintenance person of anyone. He just did his job and then asked, ‘What else needs to be done?’ ” Having passed his first two tests, Pritchard gave Cronin his first “real” project: He wanted him to scout the small-school prospects — Division III Division II and junior college. It was Cronin’s first dive into scouting, and he didn’t cut corners. He watched video and did background work, and he eventually presented Pritchard with a booklet of the top 10 small-school prospects, ranked, with a one-page report on each. At the top of his list was Virginia State’s Avis Wyatt, a rangy, 6-foot-11 big man. Months later, Cronin felt a swell of validation when Wyatt was invited to the prestigious Portsmouth Invitational. The next thing Cronin knew, Pritchard was in front of his cubicle. “He came up to my desk and was like, ‘I want you on the road as much as possible … just go!’ ” Cronin said. He had graduated to a scout. One of the first trips Cronin took, he and Pritchard met in Kansas for a Jayhawks game. The two of them remember the trip for different reasons. Cronin remembers before the game they began talking about the 2008 draft and where the Blazers figured to land late in the lottery. Pritchard asked who Cronin liked. Cronin had a dark horse who wasn’t being hyped. He said the name. (He doesn’t want the player’s name to be used to avoid talking about another team’s player.) “Oh, he’s going higher than that,” Pritchard said of the player. At the time, the mock drafts had the player as a late-first rounder. Nobody had him in the top 10. The Blazers didn’t get him because he was long gone by the time they drafted 13th. “I remember that vividly, just the intuition he had as a scout,” Cronin said. “He was way ahead of his time, because at that time, none of the mocks, none of the rankings had this kid there. And he had him where he went. I had him five to 10 spots lower.” Pritchard said he remembers Cronin being a sponge during that trip. As they watched Kansas play, Pritchard turned to Cronin and told him he was going to make it in this business. Cronin asked why. “Because not one time did you tell me what you thought or how much you know. You listened,” Pritchard recalled telling Cronin. “His greatest asset is his ability to listen, learn and then make the best decision possible.” Not long after, Cronin made one of his biggest decisions. Perhaps intimidated by Pritchard’s keen scouting eye, Cronin decided to diversify and start learning the collective bargaining agreement. “I knew it was a skill set that would raise my floor,” Cronin said. “So if scouting didn’t pan out, or I wasn’t useful, if I was a cap person, I would always have a role.” The NBA collective bargaining agreement is not easy reading. It’s roughly 500 pages that can simultaneously put you to sleep while also making you cross-eyed. But it went everywhere with Cronin — all 500 pages — as well as the NBA operations manual and Larry Coon’s frequently asked questions on the CBA. It was homework for Cronin assigned by then assistant general manager Tom Penn, who the NBA asked to help write the CBA. “It was like a foreign language reading it,” Cronin said. Still, he would read it on the plane to his next scouting assignment. He read it in his hotel room after filing his scouting report. “I bet I read it 100 times that year,” Cronin said. “I would just grind through it. And every time I read it, I got a little better. It started making more sense. And then over time, as I watched deals happen around the league, or as I was in our meetings hearing the experts talk about it, I started to absorb it.” So much so that Pritchard and Penn began to include him in high-leverage meetings and ask for his input. “He went from being an intern doing small things to being a cap guy, and that just doesn’t happen,” Pritchard said. “He had good basketball scouting skills already, and now he knows the cap better than just about anybody. Add that to his ability to communicate with people, and you have the perfect marriage of skills for a GM.” Cronin says he loves numbers, but he says the salary cap is more than numbers. “The cap isn’t really about math,” Cronin said. “The cap is about creativity, rule-following, different scenarios.” Trail Blazers chair Jody Allen has asked Cronin to sit next to her at home games, and the first two contests, he said the two have been engaged in almost nonstop conversation. For much of the first game, Allen was nodding as Cronin spoke. Were they talking about the roster? The luxury tax line (the Blazers are $3 million over)? The game? “All of the above,” Cronin said. “Really, we were just enjoying ourselves. I’m having a blast down there, and it’s a great venue to communicate and share ideas, plan a little and just have commentary on the game. Some of it is deeper stuff, but mostly, we are hanging out, watching basketball, cheering for the team.” In addition to improving the roster, one of the issues for Cronin to navigate is whether he will shave $3 million off the payroll to avoid the luxury tax. Since she took over the team in 2018, Allen has paid the tax in 2018-19 and 2019-20 and is due to pay it this season. “Jody has been amazing about the tax,” Cronin said. “With her, we’ve been in it every year but last year, so she’s been great about it, and to my point, she wants to win.” Cronin said he has not been instructed to get under the tax line but said he will soon prime Allen with the pros and cons of paying the tax so she can start thinking about it. “There will be discussions, like hey, this (getting under the tax line) could be beneficial for these reasons, but a lot of them are not financial,” Cronin said. “Just in your ability to operate and transact. You are a little more limited when you are in the tax. You run into stuff like you can’t do sign-and-trades, you have a smaller midlevel and your trade fudge-factor is smaller … so there are a lot of cap mechanic benefits to being out of the tax.” Cronin said he will have those tax discussions soon. “And we will have to weigh that with how it will affect our roster and how we make current deals,” Cronin said. “You want to get it in front of them so they are thinking about it. But being $3 million in isn’t a problem to back out a little bit.” In the meantime, he will be answering the phones, dealing with the circling sharks. The Blazers are not dead, he will tell them, but they are open for business. It’s what he likes to call “hitting the ground running.” “The core challenge we are facing is it’s extremely difficult to go from good to great,” Cronin said. “We’ve had a solid team for years, but we’ve had a ceiling. How do we bust that ceiling in order to compete?” The answer might be unpopular. And it might hurt. But if Cronin thinks it pushes the Blazers to the next level, he’s going to do it. “I will say this: He will be very thorough, and I don’t think he will be afraid to take a risk,” Pritchard said.
I'm all in on this guy....he's friends with K Pritchard, Chad Buchanon and Cho already as well as pretty well connected through his years of scouting...this guy is more than qualified to rock this position and right the ship. He's getting praise from GMs who probably hated dealing with Olshey anyway.....this is a really good thing for the Blazers
sorry, but I'm at the 'talk is cheap' stage for any Blazer management right now. Show me first, before I believe I mean: "enhance"....? what does that mean?
I’m kind of in the same boat. He wants to say all the right things because he wants the permanent job. He better be on the phones constantly because I doubt this 1st time GM is super connected around the league. I’m rooting for him though. Seems like a great guy. Hope he’s not in way over his head.
Billups brother used to play and is now the head coach at University of Denver. I wonder if their was some familiarity with each other before Chauncey’s hire.
sounds right, especially if Cronins preference for upside is to be believed. Makes me also think Cronin would’ve never drafted someone like Swanigan and was most likely pro Nas/Simons as well.
I guarantee you that a guy who played college ball, has a masters in sports management, has worked his way up as a scout, then a cap expert and has been an assistant GM for years is far more qualified than the fucking used car salesman, with an English degree and no playing experience that we just got rid of.
Then he's probably on board with all the other former top draft picks we've picked up over the years. Olshey loved dumpster diving on top high school recruits that didn't pan out in college. They probably agreed on many of those.
Yeah him and Chauncey said they've known each other long before Chauncey got hired. They talked about how they played against each other in high school but didn't get into how or when they got to know each other after that.
It literally said in the article that he was authorized by Olshey to reach out to other teams and agents. Lol.
I don't recall a time when Westbrook was "end of the first round." I recall him always being a top-10/top-15 guy. But I could be wrong, I don't have an encyclopedic memory of mock drafts at every stage.
I think he did start fairly late and work his way up. Even on draft night, some mocks had DJ Augstine going top 5 and Russ possibly being closer to 10.
