Blazers offseason worse than the Rockets and Heat

These national writers are ridiculous

on.nba.com/1pTX6Xr

Can the 2014-15 Blazers be more of a national surprise than the 2013-14 Blazers?

Last year at the start of the 2013-14 season the national media largely picked the Blazers to miss the playoffs. They were ranked behind the Utah Jazz in betting odds. Then national media was flabbergasted that we were leading the conference a quarter of the way through the season and contending for a top3 seed. But many knowledgeable fans here who follow the team expected the playoffs and were not surprised as our starters had been at the top of the NBA during the 33 win season. The teams core players were all under 30 which historically leads to improvements. Blazer management had made the bench deliberately bad the previous year when it was one of the worst in NBA history; improvement would be nearly certain as even one of the leagues weakest benches with replacement level players would be a huge improvement.

Well now we are entering another offseason and national analysts are at it again. They rank the Rockets and Heat offseason as more productive than the Blazers! Ridiculous. If this team was in New York or Los Angeles it would probably be ranked in the top5 for retaining a second round playoff core of all under 30 players. Can any other team in the league say that? I’m starting to enjoy our role as underdog’s. It’ll be interesting to hear all the national writers become so shocked again when the Blazers have success.

 

Don't really see anything egregious with what he said. The ranking is a bit questionable, but he clearly says what we all have said this offseason, which is- nothing to write home about as we had very little to work with.

 

LOL No wonder he ranked us low.

Idiot.

 

With the money that we had available and knowing what is coming up next summer Im not sure what type of splash they expected us to make

 

If you're grading absolutely (i.e. point blank, how much did a team improve or regress), then Portland's off-season wasn't very good, as they didn't add much. If you're grading relatively (i.e. what did they do relative to what they had available to work with), then Portland's off-season was probably fine...they didn't have much cap/exception space but they utilized a small amount of space reasonably well.

Skimming Aldridge's article, it seems he was going the absolute route.

 

I think Minstrel nailed it.

There may have been valid reasons - but the team did have a passive off-season.

 

The reason why I don't give much credence to these kinds of articles is that they don't understand the chemistry factor.

A lot of people didn't predict us to do that well last season. I knew we were going to see a significant jump because we already had an excellent starting five, we just needed a bench. We had arguably a top five in the west starting unit. The problem was that they were playing too many minutes and they had to virtually win games by themselves. They had no help whatsoever from the second unit. Last summer we added Mo, Dorell, TRob, and CJ. Right there, that's a huge improvement to our bench, and I expected us to win 50ish games and place 4th or 5th because our starters would finally be able to lighten their load a bit.

This summer, it's all about fine tuning that second unit. Letting guys develop. I'm not projecting a marked improvement because it's hard enough to win 50+ games in the west. I do think, however, that we will see a sustainable level of play that we lacked last season. We relied too much on guys like Mo, Wes, and Nic to have good games, while all three of them aren't especially consistent on offense. So when we were good, we were really really good. Especially during that stretch when Wes couldn't miss. That's when we played our best basketball of the season, but it wasn't sustainable. So this season I think Neil was focused on trying to setup the second unit to be able to actually provide consistent relief to our starters.

Blake might not be as talented as Mo, but he's more consistent.

Kaman, while not glamorous, should be able to give consistent scoring off the bench (if he stays healthy.)

TRob and CJ should be able to contribute more consistently this year. I thought both looked really good during summer league. Barton is still an enigma. I think he plays better in a structured environment. When he's given too much freedom, he tends to force it too much and that hurts the team.

I really like our second unit of Blake, CJ, Robinson, and Kaman. I'm on the fence about Barton and Dorell. Either one might be able to provide scoring off the bench. I tend to lean more towards Dorell because he has a longer track record, and I'm hoping last season was an anomaly.

 

Steve Blake SUCKS

 

Steve Blake basically didn't even play in the playoffs for the Warriors last year

 

You do realize that you don't have to create a new post every time you start a new sentence, right?

 

There's 14 other players on the team, don't be so myopic.

 

Plus, Terry Stotts can't coach defense!

 

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to PtldPlatypus again

 

Those waterboys don't know how to hydrate the players properly!!

 

No no, Olshey is too Hollywood, and he'll eventually leave us.

 

Basically we got Blake and Kaman for Mo and Earl, Freeland is healthy, Barton, CJ and Robinson should be better. Wright, Crabbe and Claver need to step up and I don't see any falling off of bench talent. We have more bench scoring, we're bigger and we have a lot of options. It's all good. I don't take NBA journalists predictions seriously anyway. Blazers are almost always underrated before the season starts. I think it's a motivating thing for the team. We got better this offseason without overpaying guys or losing talent. Golden State paid a lot of money for Iggy last season and it didn't really push them forward that much. Trust Olshey!