Pelton: Blazers Project As 2014 Lottery Team

Frankly, I'm not a fan of upside-down cake, either.

 

I think there's a small part of Olshey that wishes he weren't so good so soon so we could have lost more games and gotten a higher lottery pick. Note the word "small".

 

JT weighs in...

http://www.csnnw.com/blog/blazers-talk/john-thompson-talks-lillard-says-he-needs-better-teammates

 

LMA is going to be on the roster on opening night. Trading him now after season ticket sales opened up would piss off the people who actually pay to watch the games. The time to trade him was during the draft. No trade that made sense to improve the team was offered, so this is the team you're going to see going into training camp.

 

I think that's a ridiculous thought. They drafted him to be the franchise PG. If Lillard sucked last year, then it was a wasted draft pick. Why in the world wouldn't you want your lottery pick to make an immediate impact? By "small", do you mean "no part"?

 

I know John Thompson was a great coach, but damn if he wasn't one of the worst NBA TV commentators of all time. I had flash backs listening to him just now.

 

heh, I thought he had a bag full of marbles in his mouth, and when he didn't spit them out after the first 15 seconds, I stopped watching.

 

I swear some fans think you build a winning team by acquiring bad players.

 

Perhaps, but you never know which teams are talking during this down time. Trades are a part of the NBA. As a season ticket holder, I've never felt betrayed by the Blazers because of a deal they've made.

 

I'm sure that's how they drafted him. However, I don't think they expected him to be this good, this soon. Olshey has stated he made the bench purposefully bad. PURPOSEFULLY. Why would he do so unless he didn't want to be in the lottery this year? You think our late season swoon was by accident?

Dame had an historic rookie year. There's no way we could have realistically anticipated that kind of season from him.

 

We're stuck in the middle, which is the worst place to be. We're not bad enough to get a great player in the draft and not good enough to get to the second round.

By the way, you build a winning team by acquiring very good to great players. However, you also need to stay bad long enough to restock a roster that was this depleted.

 

The Pistons won a title and the Pacers built a contender without bottoming out. The teams that bottom out and rebuild to be a contender normally get ultra lucky with a Durant or Duncan, those players only come around a few times a decade; it might take a celler dweller 30 or more years to get that kind of luck. Meanwhile the team would hemorrhage money and consider moving out of Portland. I'd rather follow the Detroit/Indy blueprint.

Also, look at MVP candidates like Steve Nash and Tony Parker, they were late draft picks. Elite big men like Roy Hibbert and Marc Gasol were picked in the late first round and second round. Getting a top 5 lottery pick is not the only way to acquire contending talent. Since the team has to already be at a big disadvantage to be in the position for such picks, it can be a much harder road to contend. The last thing I would want is for the Blazers to intentionally suck for most of a decade, get lucky and draft an MVP like Cleveland, New Orleans, Minnesota, then have them walk out of town since the team was so horrible to begin with even with an MVP player they couldn't win.

 

We already got incredibly lucky and drafted Oden..... but it blew up in our face.

 

Just goes to show you that even if your lucky it may not matter.

 

Sometimes when you think you're lucky, you're actually incredibly unlucky.

I've always wondered if the warning signs were really there, or if Oden was truly just extremely unlucky.

 

There were warning signs but at the same time realistically Oden was the pick everyone was going to take. Its one of those times I just chalk it up to bad luck and possibly bad conditioning.

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That sounds like the Blazers of the late 70s to late 80s. We were on the high side of mediocre, and only because we had a HoF coach. Even he couldn't push the wet noodle of a roster we had up the hill, and that roster had some great players. However, we needed more.

 

Don't you think it's maybe a tad bit early to make that declaration? Can we please wait till the season gets rolling a bit to try and determine the Blazers fate.

 

It assumes we're a top-four team in the West. Who do we beat to get there? OKC? SAS? MEM? LAC? You will likely face one of those teams on the road. Man, I just don't see it.

I'm willing to give up a year of making the playoffs to get another asset. However, I recognize my viewpoint is a minority one.