DusterBuster wrote:monopoman wrote:DusterBuster wrote:
I’m with Blazin, the depth on this years roster is trash. Olshey is usually good at finding diamonds in the rough, but he really pooped the bed this summer in that regard. Tolliver and Herzonja are painfully bad. Worse depth combined with a largely brand new team and significant injuries to key guys is simply a recipe for ... something other than success.
As far as I’m concerned, this is a whatever season. In other words, whatever happens is fine. It’s just a placeholder season until this trade deadline or summer when they reload the team, Nurk is healthy again and Ant, Collins and Little all have another NBA season under their belts.
All that said though, there’s been a bit too much handwringing in general this early in the year. At least in terms of the team chemistry. The injuries and depth worries are totally warranted tho.
To be fair we did have a pretty rough depth situation at the beginning of last year, picking up Kanter+Hood was huge at the deadline and turned a pretty good team into a good team.
It was still better than this year. Granted, it got exponentially better after getting Hood and Kanter, but it wasn’t as bad as this years team was, particularly in the front court.
to that: Portland was 33-21(.611) when Hood joined the Blazers; and 35-23 (.603) when Kanter joined. They finished at .646, although some of that was due to them having, IIRC, the 2nd easiest SOS over the last 25 games
all Portland is missing, from injuries, off the team that made the WC finals is Zach. Nurk has been out for 7 months and 42 games. The injuries are an easy excuse and there is some validity to it, but Zach's talent isn't so enormous that his loss actually gutted the team. The problem was there was nothing behind him. Going from a PF rotation of Aminu/Zach to Zach/Tolliver/Hezonja was a significant downgrade even when Zach was healthy. Going from Aminu/Zach to Hezonja/Tolliver....yikes! And so far, the SF rotation of Harkless/Hood was much better than Hood/Bazemore. And of course, as backup bigs, Kanter/Meyers were worlds better than Skal/Ezeli...sorry, I meant Skal/Gasol
2016 Olshey pretty much hamstrung 2019 Olshey's efforts at building the 2019 roster. Chickens meet roost. Half of the roster, 7 players, are on vet minimum or rookie scale deals that are less than those vet minimums. And that will rise to 8 players when Melo shows up. Meanwhile, Nurk & Hood are on significantly discounted contracts; plus Zach is only making 4.2M. That's 10 players adding up to only a third of the salary cap. Yet, the Blazers have the highest payroll in the league. Portland is paying Harley money for a Moped
I really thought people, Blazer front office included, were underrating the departing players this summer and overrating the replacements. That they were exaggerating the flaws of the players leaving while minimizing or dismissing the flaws of players coming in. So far, that's definitely been the case