There are potentially a number of reasons our team is getting such a poor start. In your opinion, what is the #1 reason?
I mean the biggest reason is obviously injuries. It's just the injuries are also exposing and exacerbating many of the underlying faults with the team/org that many of us have been aware of.
Olshey. Tolliver and Hezonja are worthless. Pau is 40 and hurt. Aminu was undervalued. Laymen should have been resigned. Meyers and Harkless may be better than empty stats Whiteside. If you can get a young player for CJ do it and build for 2021.
I guess in theory everything can technically be attributed to Olshey. He's the one who hired/keeps Stotts; he's the one who turned over the roster; he's the one who hasn't traded CJ; he's the one who brought in/drafted injured guys; he's the one who put us into cap hell in 2016. But I picked "combination" because it's all of those things, and I don't necessarily think it's reasonable to blame him for not having a crystal ball.
I voted Acclimation as I still believe Stotts will be able to find a rotation that will win games in late December and beyond. As a tremendous aside, I've always believed that, invariably, over the years, the #1 contributing factor to the Blazers woes has been, well, Portland, OR. Be it taxes, African-American entertainment shortcomings, keepin' it weird, or whatever, FA's generally cross this city off their respective lists. It is what it is, folks.
I don't always buy this argument. Do you have any idea what it's like being non-white, non-Mormon in Salt Lake City? Or Oklahoma City? Those cities land some great FAs and the market "culture" lends nothing to an NBA player's culture.
As I've heard Dame, CJ, and Olshey point out, if a player is more concerned with the night life in a city over his fit as a basketball player on the team then we probably don't want those guys on the team anyway. Look at Rodney Hood as a perfect example, he chose to re-sign because it was the best situation for him on the court. The problem is guys like that are hard to find when they're all young millionaires.
I'd blame it on a highly liberal city, but, for the most part, Blacks are liberals, so I'll lose that notion.
Or how about, we should be treading water with an MVP candidate. Instead of 4-8, with embarrassing losses to GLeague teams and teams also ravaged with injuries.
I think a lot of us downgraded the impact of Nurk being out since they made it to the WCF's without him. We also couldn't afford to have Collins go down either. So injuries are definitely the #1 reason but can you count injuries when the main one was already known about 8 months ago? Acclimation is a bullshit excuse. Why did we get off to slow starts each of the previous 3 seasons with a relatively stable roster? Plus there was a ton of roster turnover this summer for almost all teams so how does it apply for us but not the teams we lose to? The schedule has been easier than originally anticipated with GS missing their whole starting 5 when they played us, the Kings haven't had Bagley either game and Fox the last game, the 76ers had Embiid suspended, the Clippers didn't have Paul George, Atlanta didn't have John Collins, and Toronto was missing several good players last night too. I can understand why people would choose Olshey but really guys like Tolliver, Gasol, and Hezonja were minimum contract guys (all we had to offer) that weren't supposed to be playing huge minutes for this team. Plus he still has the ability to make moves over the course of the next nearly 3 months to fix things. I'm waiting to see if he does something with the big contracts first. Depending on what happens roster-wise I may come back to this one later on. As far as Stotts goes I believe his poor coaching has resulted in a minimum of 2 losses and probably even more but we'll just keep it at 2 to keep it simple. There were times last night where all 5 players including the one with the ball were standing around not doing anything at all in the 4th quarter of a close game. How does that even happen? He's also failing to reign CJ in while he shoots us out of games. On top of all that he's running our franchise player into the ground playing major minutes right off the bat and even in back to backs and 5 games in 7 night scenarios. I also don't see a single adjustment to the personnel he does have. Instead he is trying to force players into roles that don't accentuate their strengths. Even with the injuries they have enough talent to be better than 4-8 so far so I'm voting Stotts as the culprit.
