Or enjoy being competitive one game at a time until Nurk gets back....I still enjoy watching even though we're stumbling through 4th qtrs. right now. We are not getting blown out in these losses..most of them we'd actually win if we could shoot better than low 30% from the field...I see our shooting woes as just a quirk.
This section of the forum is why I no longer really participate. All the ones that were rejoicing certain players let go or traded and before the season praising how we are now going to the finals and after less than a 1/4 of the season the same clowns are now bad mouthing players, coaches and GM's and pushing blame wherever they can. This forum adds no value to my basketball enjoyment and I will stick with this team no matter what. This thread is a perfect example of all that is wrong with this forum. Ok, see ya in the OT section.
Olshey has a good relationship with Jody Allen....he might be the guy keeping the Blazers in Portland moving forward or she could move it to Seattle....that alone is a reason to want stability in the front office. If the franchise leaves Oregon you'll see me in the meltdown thread
Blazers are gone as soon as she sells. Olshey could care less if they are here or Alaska he’s loyalty isn’t to the city it’s to who pays him
Unlike most 20 year olds he's played professionally in Europe before being an NBA rookie....the kid is going to be an all-star for years to come. To people who saw him in Euro league...this isn't surprising
He’s amazing. This is the type of talent you need to win championships. You need generational talents. Not regular all star level. He’s honestly mvp right now. Nobody ever imagined he could will that team he has to 11-5 and looking like the best player in the league. I hope we can have a talent like this one day.
I don't buy any of that.....not for a second. Olshey's loyalty is to the franchise from everything I've seen during his tenure...he left a big market in LA to take this job...Oregon is a much better place to raise his kids and nothing about him makes me think he's unhappy here or couldn't care less.....he's very rich right now. Rich and drinking drinkable water and breathing breathable air...for some folks I think failure of the team is looked at as success because they've not liked the front office coaching staff or roster.....losing vindicates those sentiments...the team doesn't have this mindset thankfully....it's a fair weather fan thing in my view....the Knicks have a lousy front office...we have a much more stable franchise and the Knicks are the mecca of NBA history in many ways.....I don't want Blazer fans turning into Knicks fans just because we're not winning right now....the Knicks haven't won in years and tanking or coaching changes hasn't made it any better.
Speaking of panic - the thing that scares me the most is Neil trading Simons and Little For DeRozan or something like that, he might even trade the pick!
God man I love Dame but he loves these fortune cookie quotes. It’s not even his fault too but sometimes just SOMETIMES a certain combination of guys just doesn’t work sometimes. Now next year is a different story we’ll get our main guys back and little/Simons will be improved with a shiny lottery pick and we’re back in this tbing
when has he ever "swung for the fences"? He's a master at dumpster diving, and pretty decent at drafting perimeter players. But swinging for the fences requires actually making a core player or a high lottery pick available...taking a big risk for the chance of an even bigger reward. By all reports, when PG13 was on the trade block, Olshey made CJ untouchable. That's the opposite of swinging for the fences. Olshey always bunts "contender land again"....? the last time they were a contender was when Pippen was on the team and they had the biggest 4th quarter choke in Blazer history. Trading Whiteside or Bazemore isn't going to elevate a team with the 4th worst record into being a contender the problem is that fucking around with the back end of the roster isn't going to make Portland a contender. Making changes in rotation players 5-9 almost never alters the trajectory in a plus direction. It can however crater the trajectory as we've seen from Olshey's past summer if Portland wants to dynamically change the trajectory, they will actually have to swing for the fences. Take a big damn risk. That's only going to happen if the GM can put aside his irrational biases for 'his guys', and move a core piece. CJ is just about the only candidate for this, but his value is probably pretty low with the season he's having and the 5yr/157M he's owed.
And....What if both Neil and Dame are in win now mode. The Lakers pretty much mortgaged there future when they got Anthony Davis.
Sometimes I wonder if Damian and his positive outlook on everything isn't quietly contributing to the issues. Sometimes the leader needs to he a "bad guy"... Sometimes, it feels like poor Damian is doing his best Kevin Bacon, at the end of Animal House, getting trampled over while continuing to claim " stay calm...everythings gonna be ok..".(or whatever his line was...)
c'mon man, that wasn't anywhere close to swinging for the fences. That was Olshey dumpster diving, and his motivation was that he wanted to kick the can of Plumlee's impending RFA summer a year down the road by adding a C who had an extra year left on their rookie deal so he was looking around for teams anxious to dump a young C with year(s) left on their rookie deal. That's why he was talking to Philly about Okafor and Denver about Nurkic. And the reporting is that the Blazers were right at the gate for the Okafor trade, to such a point that Philly held Okafor out of games believing they had a deal (reports were Philly was pissed off about the deal falling thru). Reading between the lines, it seems pretty likely that the Blazers would have traded for Okafor if Denver hadn't added the 1st round pick yes, the trade worked great for Portland but that was a lot more a function of luck than anything else. If you want to give Olshey credit for leveraging Denver out of that pick, that's fine and maybe accurate. But it was not a swing for the fences...it was a bunt
Neil isn’t unhappy per se in Oregon, but personally I think he’d rather be in about 20 other cities and he’d move to LA yesterday if he could.
I really disagree their chance to trade CJ for trajectory altering pieces went out the window at least til he's down to 1-2 years left on that contract. No team is giving that to the Blazers in exchange for CJ right now. There only chance is the expiring contracts, to a team looking to reset. The only pieces they'd get back for CJ right now are from contending type teams that are willing to take on CJ and that contract because they think he puts them over the top, and those teams are only going to give you future assets, young un-proven guys and picks. Detroit's not getting rid of BG for another guy on a massive contract for example, they're only trading BG to hit the reset button, bringing on a massive long term contract like CJ's. They traded Nik and Baldwin for a Starter / Role Player esque guy last year who was a major upgrade over those two guys. Traded Mason Plumlee for Jusef Nurkic. There are lots of ways to make your team significantly better without hitting the reset button, if you want to call it on the Dame / CJ era that's fine but now that they're both locked up for a long time. Trading one probably means you're resetting the team for 2-3 years too, which seems pretty much like torturing Dame through another complete rebuild which kind of looks like what they're doing anyways...
They are both assets that can be used if something evolves that will improve the team. It would have to be very good as Neil likes them two as much as you do.
