Zombie Fire Olshey

Again, you generalize...to the whole season, not the last month or 2. Sweeping platitudes are useful in law and for cleaning sweat from NBA floors.

 

Ref the Afflalo trade.
Barton developed into the best player in that deal. But, he never really got the chance to develop in Portland. Sound familiar?
Oh, to make this trade worse, Olshey stuffed a first round pick into the panties of Denver's GM, which still leaves Olshey's fingers all stinky.

If we had not traded for Afflalo, and after Wes got hurt, both Barton and CJ would have got more mpg and developed faster.

Plus, If Olshey had faith that CJ could be a good starter as you suggest in your post. Olshey would not have traded for Afflalo. CJ was playing just OK that season, but there were a lot of questions about his game. CJ needed more mpg to develop. Sound familiar?

 

No, CJ blossomed at the end of the season we had Afflalo. CJ had and incredible playoff series. And started the next season when his production more than tripled.

And Afflalo was a 25 game rental.

 

Oh, so this is where this went. I was gonna say that I con't think Blazer management understands this concept. They seem to always go for the win today.

 

Agree with this. Plus there was extra motivation with LA about to become UFA to show him the organization was "all in". The AA trade was a bust in hind sight, but after a 30-8 start that year the buzz was "make the WCF". Had they not made a move after Wes went down, & just rolled with CJ it would have been the equivalent of waving the white flag. Sucks that it went down like that, but I don't fault Olshey for trying to salvage the season (while attempting to score points with our star FA to be)

 

The Afflalo trade was a bad one even at the time, in a vacuum. In other words, even with just what we knew at the time, it was a bad trade looking purely at the basketball aspects. Afflalo was, even then, a declining veteran, especially on defense. Outside of a "bounce back" (which turned out to be a dead-cat bounce) season in Orlando the year before, his offensive numbers were on the downward slope. His time in Denver before the trade only confirmed that the final Orlando season was flukish. And Olshey probably even knew that--he was trading for a reserve (Matthews got hurt after the Afflalo trade, if I recall correctly) and gave up a lot for a reserve.

Of course, then you can toss in "trying to capitalize on buzz" and "showing Aldridge they were committed" to increase his chances of re-signing and people can decide if that outweighed what an overpay it was in trade assets.

To me, it doesn't. I don't think Afflalo was a big enough name to excite most fans and, anyway, the team shouldn't be making bad decisions just to excite fans. Also, winning was always going to be what kept Aldridge around (if anything was) and Afflalo just wasn't much of a needle-mover.

 

I mentioned this a while ago. Neil is not a Portland guy, doesn't like it here.....and a lot of people that work around the team have very little good to say about him. It often starts with "Prima Donna" and goes downhill from there.

 

As long as we are packing Olshey's bags, and sending him back to CA. Lets pack up Clownzano, McGowan & HCP as well, and send them all back home to CA. None of them get the Blazer's culture, and have proven it many times over.

 

We need a GM who keeps it weird.

 

I want a GM I never hear from, rarely see, and only marvel at how all he does is fly around the country and the world scouting players 365 days a year.

 

If there was just 1 single GM I would agree. There are Assistant GM's and Scouts who are more what you are asking for.

 

Trader Bob fans all seem down on Olshey....I like the guy...now I hear he's not well liked or doesn't like Portland? I don't look back on the Larry Miller Chad Buchannan era that fondly myself

 

You really didn't get what I was driving at I suppose.

 

You want a GM efficient at turning team business into tax-deductible frequent flier mileage, because efficiency is an important trait in GMs. Don't worry, I got it.