Are you talking about the extension? How is the extension not related to the CBA? The salary escalation I thought was required in order to extend the contract. If I am wrong I am wrong. Also, I didn't say I was alone in rejecting the extension, but you said "a ton", where I said "not many". Tell the truth about the distinction. Edit: I just did some checking I think you are right about the extension. For some reason I thought there were required salary escalators for veteran extensions but there are only limits. So you are right to say that Olshey was bidding against himself there. I still don't think he's wholly to blame for the conditions that made such a contract acceptable in the eyes of many, because certainly in relation to Dame's supermaxx, C.J.'s contract isn't especially ridiculous, but in the context to setting up a competitive team under a salary cap it is. It's just that Olshey had to extend him, or he had to trade him and I don't think that's what Dame wanted. I change my mind and say if Olshey could've made a lesser offer to keep C.J. he should've given the apparent necessity of keeping Dame happy.
This year I think they knew they were going to lose Trent for nothing, so they traded him for somebody who may come back.
I'm as big an Olshey skeptic as anyone, but Nurk is probably one of his major accomplishments. He basically traded up from a draft pick in the twenties to Plumlee to Nurk. Nice work! Acquiring surprisingly good centers is one of the few Olshey strengths (so long as we don't include the draft, and thus Meyers). (But that might be partly much-maligned our coaching staff, because Rolo, Plumlee and Nurk all looked a fuck of a lot better as Blazers than they did before.)
Leonard got resign by Miami for 10 million this year. Now he out of the league due to his mouth over loaded his ass.
Olshey's not terrible at trading, and no Portland GM gets to be good at free agency (although I think that was the hope when we got Olshey, because his major accomplishment was getting Chris Paul to the Clips) but his drafting is patchy at best. He gets surprisingly adequate players in the second round, but has missed on too many good players (most glaringly Antetokounmpo and Adebayo).
Olshey wasn't trying to upgrade Plumlee. He was trying to punt Plumlee's rookie extension a year or two down the road by trading for a rookie C who wasn't in the 4th year of his contract. For chrissakes, Olshey himself said that. He was all set to trade Plumlee to Philly for Okafor...so much so that Philly believed the deal was done and held Okafor out of a couple of games to protect the trade. But Denver ponied up a 1st at the last minute so Olshey backed out of the deal with Philly and took Nurkic now, if you want to argue that Olshey was playing 4-dimensional chess and leveraged the Okafor deal into a pick and Nurkic, fine. Even though Olshey's history is one of mainly playing checkers on a borrowed board. But there's enough to the story to at least suspect he just lucked into Nurkic as far as acquiring good C's, he has a few times but that's only because they have fit into his wheelhouse which is picking up players that teams were desperate to dump. Just more dumpster diving. That's how he got Lopez (who Olshey didn't have the foresight to re-sign so, another wasted asset), Nurkic, Kanter, and Whiteside. If there's a reject pile anywhere, Olshey will be hip deep in it but his judgement on C's is on full display when judged by who Olshey thought was worth a max contract. He's offered those max deals to Roy Hibbert, Kanter, Greg Monroe, and Whiteside (after offering a max deal to Chandler Parsons). And he offered a max-MLE to Spenser Hawes. Any GM that has tried to ink those kind of deals should never be credited with good evaluation skills on C's
Agreed. LMA was a good player - but in no way was he a great player. His 'name' value exceeded his on court production IMO. I was wanting to trade him after the '13 season... long before he left. My oldest boy remembers me cursing his inefficient mid-range turn around jumper that he loved so much.
Norm Powell is a fantastic return for Gary. So what I'm saying is why didn't we take a bit less but someone that we would either have under contract next season or like Gary the ability to match. Hell it would have been better by my estimation if we would have got draft considerations. We just needed value past this season unless of course we received someone in return for Gary that made us a contender and Norm obviously didn't do that. I realize that Norm is better than Gary but the way they used Norm or maybe it was his fit but I'm pretty sure it was the fact that we were using him out of position and that was the fuck up. Regardless we were .571 with Norm and we were .591 with Gary. You can talk to me about strength of schedule or whatever but we didn't add value by having a worse record and going out in the first round of the playoffs again. So if Norm walks Olshey gave up Gary without getting anything back in return. Now if Olshey trades CJ and re-signs Norm I will shut up but not because I'm wrong, just because it won't be worth complaining about anymore. Olshey again, just like with LA is gambling with capitol that a small market franchise like ours can't afford to gamble with.
You're not wrong. He should have had something figured out with GTJ before he was forced to gamble on zero return.
Neil is fine. He’s put together formidable teams that should’ve performed better than they did. Coach Stotts is the scapegoat because he couldn’t lead those teams to success. Us getting swept by San Antonio, New Orleans, KD-less warriors, and losing this winnable series against the Nuggets was on Stotts, not Olshey. Those were all years that Blazers under-performed. It’s not like a new GM is going to magically make us more attractive to free agents or provide us worthwhile trade assets. Olshey has established reputation in the league and is in good repute with many agents.
It was the then bottom feeding Nets who offered Crabbe the 4 year 75M contract, but Neil gallantly matched it to retain his services. I'm on record here not wanting to retain AC for MLE type money and took mucho guff for it at the time. There were some fugly moves leading up to that point by our former soap opera actor turned GM, but I'd kept the faith. That one broke any hope of his leadership ever bringing the Blazers out of the mediocre malaise thats plagued them for the past couple decades. Nash 2.0 He might look pretty but he's a joke as a talent evaluator, please turn the page. STOMP
It feels like with some of the boneheaded moves Olshey has done since being here he has been trying to get fired like forever ago, yet we insist on not firing him. Smart we are. Reverse psychology at its finest folks.
Stotts fired before Olshey means Olshey is staying and so is CJ. Of our 3 biggest problems we've only taken care of 1 of them.