Curious if this is an on the court or off the court addition. To help with strategy on the court, or off the court? Maybe help dealing with agents? Or is this an off/def type thing? Marketing?
Hired to fire Stotts so Olshey doesn't have to Or at least to take the Blame out of Olsheys hands for firing him. "She says it's time for change and that we need a new coach, sorry man, it's been good!"
Hired to replace Olshey? There could be a plan in place already that he's moving on and this is a proactive move.
Call me overly optimistic (and I often am) but it sounds like great news to me. Stotts is a players' coach, and guys really do seem to love him. He's the good cop (are we still allowed to use this analogy? Fuck it, I am.) Olshey figures we need to go in a massively different direction, so rather than shitcan the coach mid-season he's hired the "bad cop" to tell Stotts: 1. Melo is riding pine. Kanter is used more situationally. Just too much shitty defense. Sorry about any promises we made you, but it's not like teams haven't done the exact same thing to you before. 2. CJ is getting the short hook if our defense continues to suck. He's getting traded this off season and his recent shitty play has pretty much nuked a lot of his prior value. So fuck it if he gets mad for only playing 25 minutes a night. 3. Getting Norm and Jones back next year are strategic goals. Make them happy. 4. Nassir and Jones are our top guys off the bench. There's a lot of bad news to unpack there for vets who won't like it. I think Stotts can more easily deliver this news if "the new Director of Strategy" tells him he has to do it.
so they hired someone with zero front office experience in the nba? I swear some of the leaps in this thread are too funny.
One don't knock the hiring but would like know what really is because it could wide range of the thing. But because she a woman don't mean she don't know nothing about talent or about the game. Obviously she does she been successful so far everything she has done in the game.
He was probably asked by Jody to hire someone to help with GM duties as he actually The President of Basketball Operations. Please be reminded that the Blazers are a junior training ground for The Vulcan Empire.
Pretty sure that none of us have ever heard of the position of Director of Basketball Strategy in conjunction with an NBA team and that we have no idea what her duties and responsibilities entail. I guess we can argue about whether she's qualified or on a future track to become Olshey's replacement. I mean, it's not as if we don't spend days debating, clawing tooth and nail for our opinions, on stuff that we have nearly no valid information about. Why should this be any different?