Excited to see, got my name on season tickets for the first time ever! What? this is the one place where its okay
You're definitely not alone, as many people on this forum think this is one of the best rosters in the NBA, turned mediocre by a single person, Stotts. I think that people just want a simple answer--having to solve major structural issues with the roster is hard and means being far from a championship. Having one of the most talented rosters with just the worst coach in NBA history means you can win the title with one move. This roster is massively flawed and not that talented. As it turns out, CJ was just playing over his head for a short time before his injury and has since shown he's a one-dimensional scorer who's pretty mediocre overall. Nurkic has talent in a vacuum, but his defensive strengths are mismatched for this era--you can pillory Stotts all you want for playing drop coverages, but he was protecting Nurkic--having Nurkic switch or even hedge would lead to equally terrible results and make Nurkic look inept. And those are, by far, Portland's two best players after Lillard. This is not a highly talented roster. Let's not even get into Olshey rostering Melo "for the legacy." Maybe this team hemorrhages points because players like Melo had to play a bunch of minutes based on the roster construction. Maybe this team shouldn't have been 29th on defense based purely on personnel, but it should have been in the 20s.
The timeframe for turning CJ into a better player has passed, IMO. The league already knows what he is. I'm hoping we can break CJ down into more important parts, but that's also unlikely.
Yep... ten fucking years of this shit but when he talked about firing Terry and the roster in general and being willing to make big moves, it's the first time ever that Neil didn't give us a run of excuses and said things had to change. That is the closest we'll ever get to hearing Olshey say that he was wrong and it was an admission that he didn't do a good enough job. That could lead to good moves.
I seriously don't get why people are giving Olshey props for realizing that the roster underachieved defensively. Yeah, no shit. But who was also the person that signed a bunch of turnstiles and kept a coach that never prioritized defense? Like of course Kanter/Melo played too much. Everyone saw in pre-season how that pairing was never going to work and we played it all the way down to the last game of the season. Isn't it part of Olshey's job to do talent evaluation and not provide these options to the coach that was predictably going to play them a ton? Maybe this team underachieved defensively because a lot of the defensive role players that Olshey brought in never saw the floor. But that is as much Olshey's problem as it was Stotts.
If I were to boil my opinion down, it would be this: Olshey gave Stotts a very poor choice of options and while Stotts probably didn't optimally utilize those options, I don't think there was a series of buttons to push that lead to tremendous success.
No roster that plays Melo and Kanter together has a chance of succeeding. Maybe in collective talent, but cohesively there is no chance we had the 3rd or 4th best roster in the conference.
Maybe Houston wanted CJ and nurkic and Trent? At the time CJ was balling but nevertheless i don’t know if Dame personally wanted a dominant ball handle and scorer of hardens level on his team. I sense that Lillard wants a great player on different positions not someone that might be his equal or better than him, and I would not blame him. Kyrie took huge hit with harden arrival no matter how much he scores he will be 2nd fiddle to Harden and best defenders guard harden not irving.(Dame obviously better than kyre But you get the point.) Dame wants to be the main alpha at his position and he always knows no mater how great CJ plays he will never be on his level. A player like Jru hollyday would be perfect fit next to him not a elite playmaker and scorer like harden.
not sure what this means. olshey is by no means without blame for this roster construction but there were tangible improvements made to the personnel that were flat out not used. We kept running the same schemes we did 6 yrs ago. All this said, i think the ONLY reason Neil is also not fired right now is because of his contract terms vs Terry's making it a harder pill for Jody to swallow than paying Terry to go fishing for a year.
Agreed. They were both heads on the proverbial hydra. And we should have cut both. Instead Olshey gets another year to tinker with a improper roster, but this time with even less tools than before. I can already see how this ends.
Probably. But I think some of you guys are seriously underestimating what it is like to lose a series you should have won, at home, fire your coach, get grilled (all his job), be competitive, be angry, then sit down and be nice answering a bunch of questions from media members who really dont know a whole lot. His snarkiness is due to all of that. I know for sure if it was me I would be short/cold/pissed at some of these questions. Maybe I am not a nice person.
He's snarky all the time. He was just extra snarky today. Also, he gets grilled twice a year. Compared to what the players have to go through (and considering how much he's paid), it's really not a big deal.
really good post Minstrel, but the wind blowing from a lot of posters about Portland's great talent this year is real gusty. I think it's bogus too, Not only is there less talent than many are claiming, the talent there is, fits poorly. If there was the 3rd or 4th best talent in the West the Blazers wouldn't have trotted out a 6'3 SF who managed to pull down a total of 13 rebounds in 6 games. And they wouldn't have had a 30M/year man being outplayed by two guys combining to make less than 2M. How did Stotts make CJ play like shit?
I think I do underestimate it, probably because I am a real dick myself, as almost all of my significant others have pointed out.
