Rumors Surfacing of Houston, Portland, NYK Trade

[Brandon-Clyde]

In before some non blazer fan suggests dame for Irving...

Too late
http://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1598804

You probably missed it because it was buried with about 50 other Kyrie trades at the same time

[Blazers98]

Maybe Olshey is just playing the long game. In two more years those 3 really bad contracts will be worth something......48 million in cap relief the next year. Lillard and CJ will still be under a reasonable contract. Maybe Nurkic has proven himself and has signed a 4 year deal and would still be under contract. We might have an opportunity to make a trade for a good player with those 3 bad contracts to add to that core.

[Wickzki]

Maybe Olshey is just playing the long game. In two more years those 3 really bad contracts will be worth something......48 million in cap relief the next year. Lillard and CJ will still be under a reasonable contract. Maybe Nurkic has proven himself and has signed a 4 year deal and would still be under contract. We might have an opportunity to make a trade for a good player with those 3 bad contracts to add to that core.

I believe in the Tooth Fairy too but it doesn't mean that The Rock is going to slide a Benjamin Franklin the next time I lose a tooth.

[Case2012]

Yeah let's wait until Dame is 30 to really make a move...


Say it with me.. Olshey.. Is.. A.. Bad.. GM..

[LillardTime]

Say it with me.. Olshey.. Is.. A.. Bad.. GM..

I still don't get why so many people are pushing this narrative.

It certainly can't be to do with his drafting because in his time he's selected CJ, Crabbe, Barton and now Swanigan and Collins who both look like solid picks. This is ignoring Lillard because of the debate about whether that decision was made by him or previous management.

It certainly can't have to do with identifying undervalued players. After all he bought in Aminu and Ed Davis on contracts that were laughed at and now are among the more valuable in the league as far as role players. He bought in Robin Lopez and Moe Harkless on absolute bargain trades. He missed on Thomas Robinson but he turned Mason Plumlee into Nurkic. I'd say his trading has been spot on.

So obviously it comes down to last years free agency, or free agency in general. It wasn't Olshey's fault that no top class free agents would agree to sign with Portland. In no particular order he tried for Howard, Whiteside, Gasol and Parsons, all of which were the higher caliber guys available at the time. All of us realise that getting QUALITY free agents to Portland has been almost impossible now for about a decade. Olshey isn't the first GM to struggle with this. Heck, we can't even get Melo to waive a NTC when we have 2 all star caliber guards to play with and New York don't want him.

While I get that everyone is frustrated with our inability at the moment to bring in that big fish that pushes us up into contention, there are also about 25 other teams in the league who haven't traded for or signed super star players in the last 12 months. The front office obviously knew that last year was our only chance with cap space due to CJs extension kicking in this coming season. I feel that if we had only signed 2 out of Meyers, Crabbe and Turner then the angst on this board would be much more tolerable.

[HoopsFanAZ]

1. Turner's contact is an overpay. $12 million per year? Okay.
2. Matching Crabbe's offer from Brooklyn? Not good. A replacement would've been rough to do, but it was a mistake.
3. Ezeli is a wash. Good shot after other options fell through.
4. Leonard's contract isn't HUGE but he really seems like a miss.
4. Lillard's contract is GOOD work.
5. McCollum's contract is GOOD work even though there was plenty of disagreement at the time about letting the market set his price ... which would've been a mistake (in my opinion); loyalty was shown, the message was sent, and guys are now getting BIG dollars in comparison.
Other moves noted by LillardTime above, amen.

Olshey may not be the greatest guy and his spin can get annoying and his trade flow hasn't flowed recently (though he did go after Paul George, apparently). BUT he's a pretty good GM ... just remember the drama of TraderBob, KP (and Penn), Steve Patterson and John Nash. A little rough. Olshey is not just better, he's a pretty good GM ... okay, the Turner/Crabbe/Leonard trifecta annoys.

[Ripcity4life]

1) I will agree Turner to me seemed like the Celtics were only going to give him 10 to 12 million per year and i believe that MIGHT have been reported after he signed with Portland. Also not sure he had a huge line of people wanting to sign him at least that early he was a 2nd to 3rd tier FA. Also seemed like all the Blazers did when Parsons turned them down is scratch off his name write in Turners and that was stupid.


2) Crabbe -- Well as much as i hated it they HAD to match BUT i wonder if they should have explored a S&T to Nets for him but not super bad but signing another wing type player in Turner made the Crabbe deal worse in my opinion.

3) Ezeli -- Something about that whole thing stinks cause after all the injuries of Roy and Oden etc - i would have thought they would be ultra careful so i am wondering if Festus lied / Misled then AND/OR Blazers medical staff are truely incompetent but leaning towards more of 1st with a sprinkle of 2nd.

4) My biggest problem with Myers is the Blazers outbid themselves BUT i am trying to remember if Mozgov got his deal before Myers cause maybe the Blazers thought some team might try to sign Myers to a crazy offer like that to match. On the brightside there is still hope Myers could get better and make the contract seem only bad not super super badl like it's looking atm,

and of course getting Dame and CJ to Sign was good and both are reasonable deals compared to what other stars are getting today.

[monopoman]

1) I will agree Turner to me seemed like the Celtics were only going to give him 10 to 12 million per year and i believe that MIGHT have been reported after he signed with Portland. Also not sure he had a huge line of people wanting to sign him at least that early he was a 2nd to 3rd tier FA. Also seemed like all the Blazers did when Parsons turned them down is scratch off his name write in Turners and that was stupid.


2) Crabbe -- Well as much as i hated it they HAD to match BUT i wonder if they should have explored a S&T to Nets for him but not super bad but signing another wing type player in Turner made the Crabbe deal worse in my opinion.

3) Ezeli -- Something about that whole thing stinks cause after all the injuries of Roy and Oden etc - i would have thought they would be ultra careful so i am wondering if Festus lied / Misled then AND/OR Blazers medical staff are truely incompetent but leaning towards more of 1st with a sprinkle of 2nd.

4) My biggest problem with Myers is the Blazers outbid themselves BUT i am trying to remember if Mozgov got his deal before Myers cause maybe the Blazers thought some team might try to sign Myers to a crazy offer like that to match. On the brightside there is still hope Myers could get better and make the contract seem only bad not super super badl like it's looking atm,

and of course getting Dame and CJ to Sign was good and both are reasonable deals compared to what other stars are getting today.

Yep, with the deal Wall just got we now have CJ and Lillard on basically "super value" deals. I have no clue how the Wizards are going to build around Wall when Walls contract going by current cap numbers is 43% of the cap. Pretty hard to build a team when one player takes up just under half of the cap himself. Like I said over time more and more players will be given "big contracts" and our contracts will look better in comparison.

[PDXKnight]

Say it with me.. Olshey.. Is.. A.. Bad.. GM..

I still don't get why so many people are pushing this narrative.

It certainly can't be to do with his drafting because in his time he's selected CJ, Crabbe, Barton and now Swanigan and Collins who both look like solid picks. This is ignoring Lillard because of the debate about whether that decision was made by him or previous management.

It certainly can't have to do with identifying undervalued players. After all he bought in Aminu and Ed Davis on contracts that were laughed at and now are among the more valuable in the league as far as role players. He bought in Robin Lopez and Moe Harkless on absolute bargain trades. He missed on Thomas Robinson but he turned Mason Plumlee into Nurkic. I'd say his trading has been spot on.

So obviously it comes down to last years free agency, or free agency in general. It wasn't Olshey's fault that no top class free agents would agree to sign with Portland. In no particular order he tried for Howard, Whiteside, Gasol and Parsons, all of which were the higher caliber guys available at the time. All of us realise that getting QUALITY free agents to Portland has been almost impossible now for about a decade. Olshey isn't the first GM to struggle with this. Heck, we can't even get Melo to waive a NTC when we have 2 all star caliber guards to play with and New York don't want him.

While I get that everyone is frustrated with our inability at the moment to bring in that big fish that pushes us up into contention, there are also about 25 other teams in the league who haven't traded for or signed super star players in the last 12 months. The front office obviously knew that last year was our only chance with cap space due to CJs extension kicking in this coming season. I feel that if we had only signed 2 out of Meyers, Crabbe and Turner then the angst on this board would be much more tolerable.

On one hand Olshey has been good at drafting players and has made sneaky deals to acquire bargain players on 1 or 2 year rental contracts. On the other hand he dealt away Batum basically for table scraps and proceeded to waste that cap space that would've gone to resign Batum on Evan Turner and Meyers. My opinion on Olshey will depend heavily on what happens in the front court. If Nurkic keeps up his all star caliber play and/or somebody else turns into a solid player in the front court we will have a pretty good roster. Alternatively if Nurk is riddled with injuries and no one else develops it will seem that Olshey failed to surround the talented backcourt with sufficient talent in the front court. Yeah he's added a lot of role players but he needs at least one of the front court players to turn into a consistently solid player if this team has any chance to be competitive.

[Dame Lizard]

Turner was easily the worst of the three.

Crabbe got signed to market value, love it or hate it. Matching the contract after signing CJ and Turner was hard to believe, but hey. The annoying thing about that contract is the trade kicker. After seeing what Hardaway got, and given Crabbe is an elite 3 PT shooter, someone was going to pay him.

Meyers was an overpay, but for a young big man (despite how clueless he looked) it is what it is. I wouldn't have resigned him, but meh.

Turner though, Olshey seemingly was bidding against himself.

At the end of the day though, maybe we wouldn't have gotten Nurk if we weren't in such a dire cap situation. Furthermore, IIRC we signed Harkless to as much money as we could afford. If one of the aofrementioned players got a couple of million less per year, Harkless may have just achieved that through negotiations.

[Renegade]

just remember the drama of TraderBob,

In his 9 seasons as GM the Blazers went 426-280. That is a 60% win ratio. Granted he was the founder of the Jail Blazers, but those were good teams.

[BlazersBroncos]

I don't think there is any way to justify the Myers and Turner contracts. Crabbe, a young homegrown SG who possesses a trait that is HIGHLY valued in todays NBA, ya, that contract can at least sorta make sense.

But Turner was, as someone mentioned earlier, a situation where Parsons turned us down and we seemingly took his offer, scratched off his name, and threw it at Turner. A guy who doesn't possess adequate shooting in a league where you MUST shoot well as a PG/SG/SF and who maxes out as a 6th man. So even on his way in we likely were paying a 6th man elite $$$ and that's before he showed to be a poor fit.

Myers was signed near summers end with few, if any suitors bidding for him. Neil simply possesses, or hopefully we can use possessed, a tremendous affinity for Leonard. Why? We may never know. But he bid against himself and in the process basically paid a rocked up Wang ZhiZhi top tier backup center money.

[Wizenheimer]

Olshey is not a bad GM; but he sure isn't a good one. What he is is a classic definition of mediocre. But that was before what he did last summer, and that has really locked Portland into a cul-de-sac.

I have several complaints about Olshey, but the main ones are:

* he had a combined 28M in cap-space his first 2 seasons as GM. But in his first season he built one of the very worst benches in NBA history (the numbers confirmed that), and his 2nd bench wasn't much better. Then, is his 3rd season, apparently, it had finally dawned on him that the Blazers needed an effective bench to compete; but, by then the Blazers had no more cap-space leaving them with just the MLE and BAE...enter Chris Kaman & Steve Blake. And, as it became even more apparent that season how vulnerable the Blazers were because of their bench, Olshey traded a 1st and Will Barton for a 25 game rental of Aaron Afflalo. Way too little, way too late

* Olshey's one big strength is bargain shopping. If another team has a player they want to dump, Olshey can capitalize. He's had some major and minor successes: Eric Maynor, Robin Lopez, Mo Harkless, & Jusuf Nurkic; and only a couple of failures like Thomas Robinson and Brian Roberts. But his follow-thru with Robin Lopez was lousy. Olshey decided that Lopez wasn't worth 13M a year but Meyers was worth 10M. And then, for most of the 2 years after letting Lopez walk, the Blazers, and their fans, spent a whole lot of time imagining how to get a C who could do some specific things; those things closely matching what Lopez does.

* the Batum trade

* Olshey's snake oil: every GM is going to have their catch-phrases and their boiler-plate GM speak. But sometimes those phrases frame their supposed philosophy. I've actually heard Olshey say two or three different things, two or three different times. One big one is that he wasn't going to "sacrifice flexibility in any transaction that didn't move the needle"; that was probably his favorite. He also supplied his job description and one of the main ones was his job "was to build and maintain an attractive inventory of trade assets".

how does he square those things he said with what he did last summer? Crabbe-Turner-Meyers...none of those guys move the needle, not individually and certainly not in the aggregate. But they sure as hell blow a giant gaping hole in any flexibility the Blazers had or may need. And their negative value goes a long way in degrading any trade value the roster might have, in large part cancelling out Olshey's 'attractive inventory of trade assets' mantra. Last summer was a major screw-up of fire-able proportions IMO

for me, the bottom line is this: After last season ended, Olshey had been on the job for five years. 5 off-seasons, 5 trade-deadlines, 5 drafts, and the entire roster was his. Five years at the helm, 3 lottery picks, 70 million in combined cap space....and what he built was a team that was 41-45 carrying the 3rd most expensive roster in the league, and about to become the most expensive....

there's just no way at all that could be considered a good performance. Even calling it mediocre might be charitable

I know my take on Olshey rankles some people. So I'll put it this way: Portland should look to upgrade the slots that Evan Turner or Meyers Leonard fill, just like they looked to upgrade JJ Hickson to Robin Lopez or Plumlee to Nurkic. They should also try to upgrade their GM position

[The Sebastian Express]

I'm curious as to how much Crabbe was his decision or Allen's. We have heard reports that Allen didn't want to let Crabbe go and said to match anything. I can't fault Olshey for that - if true -, because we all know how passionate and invested Allen can get in certain players.

However, there remains no excuse for Leonard.

[HoopsFanAZ]

Wiz,

You make an argument and provide details/evidence as to why you have a low opinion of Olshey as a GM. Fair enough. If someone takes its personally, so what. If you disagree with statements and say so and explain why, again ... so what. It's an argument. But it's not personal. And your argument is reasonable.

Lopez: I got the argument at the time that his lack of mobility outside the key on D and rebuilding around Lillard and McCollum meant he was gone. And Plumlee's mobility made sense ... but not really. Lopez is the one guy from the Aldridge team who should have been kept. His pick and rolls, decent free throw shooting, protecting the hoop, and a weird/creative dude ... perfect fit for Portland.
Matthews' achilles injury after his previous heel/foot issues made him a bad timing risk when Aldridge left. He had played through the heel, but he didn't look right. The achilles + age? Risky.
And Batum: He ran hot and cold -- annoyingly so -- as a complementary player. He was my favorite player on that team. The fundamental mistake (my opinion) was that he wasn't ALWAYS given a tough defensive assignment to keep him engaged. He needed more responsibility, not less. Reports that have filtered out suggest Paul Allen and Olshey were done with the inconsistencies. I disagreed with this assessment and probably still do so. To a lesser extent, it was the same mistake with Rudy Fernandez. Underutilized for their skills. Woulda coulda shoulda.

[Shem]

Hilarious post:

viewtopic.php?p=57822272#p57822272

The contents of the post:

[HoopsFanAZ]

OKAY, I'm not advocating for this, but what do you gentlemen and ladies think about a trade (or trade package) of McCollum for Kyrie Irving?

I'm against it because of current chemistry and skills of Lillard-McCollum, but it's Kyrie Iriving. Please explain your reasoning. Just asking.

[HoopsFanAZ]

Shem (I know this isn't your idea but ... ) regarding the TP from the Phoenix side of it. Not only no, but hell no. I live in Arizona as a Blazer fan. Any bad contracts taken on by Phoenix need to be two years or shorter to fit in with free agent shopping prior to Booker and others getting big dollars. In addition, they'd need to get unprotected picks from pretty much everybody for being the dumpster fire for everyone else.

[USER0023942]

The Leonard and Turner contracts are simply inexcusable. To even a casual fan, Leonard has never passed the eye test. in fact, he may possess the worst defensive decision making skills of any big in the history of the NBA, and I truly mean that. Turner, on the other hand, was simply a FOMO gamble.

To his credit, I think that Olshey is a good drafter and he sees the value in low-risk bets that wind up making us a playoff team every year. But so far all of his "big" moves have failed miserably, either because we mistarget FA's or we FOMO spend.

[HoopsFanAZ]

I'm old. Give me a clue on FOMO. Thank you.