Portland Trail Blazers: Flirting With Disaster
Neil Olshey is gone. Jason Kidd never showed up. The Portland Trail Blazers are a dumpster covered in gasoline, waiting for someone to strike a match. How did the Blazers end up like this?
It was a tumultuous offseason for the Portland Trail Blazers. There was the “will he or won’t he demand a trade drama” with Damian Lillard. Then there was the race between the team and Terry Stotts to see who could get away from the other first. This was followed by Lillard begging for Jason Kidd to be his new coach only to have Kidd pass on even interviewing. Then the season began.
Shortly after the Robert Sarver saga unfolded in Phoenix, the Blazers found their own general manager Neil Olshey mired in an internal investigation about the toxic work environment he created. As a result of the investigation, the team dismissed Olshey, and the franchise found itself one step closer to the abyss. Now they have a coach the players already are pushing back against, a superstar that is passive-aggressively hinting he wants out, and an underachieving roster. At least the Jail Blazers were fun.
It gets worse
Damian Lillard has struggled this season, and CJ McCollum missed time with a collapsed lung. Center Jusuf Nurkic hasn’t been healthy in years. Robert Covington lives off the nice run in Philadelphia he had in Philly from 2014-19. But he hasn’t been good since. Norman Powell is a great scorer off the bench. Unfortunately, he’s the team’s 6-foot-3 starting small forward. Larry Nance Jr. is ineffective and Dennis Smith Jr. getting playing time on a team not based in Shanghai is a travesty.
The lone bright spots have been the solid play of Anfernee Simons, who only seems like he’s been around a decade, and the emergence of Nassir Little. When the team’s superstar asked for an upgraded roster, and this is what they provide…. well it’s not good.
Dame the GM?
Lillard leaked that he’d love to play with Ben Simmons. That’s pretty much par for the course in the NBA. As the Los Angeles Lakers shadow GM Lebron James proved, players are the only people worse at being an NBA GM than actual NBA GMs. Especially when it comes to roster construction. In order to get Simmons, they’d have to trade McCollum, Simons, and draft picks (which they have few of). Let’s see how Dame Time likes it when defenses sag off 6-10 guy with treyaphobia, and he has no shooters to keep the floor spaced.
Blow it up
Stories are already coming out that the Portland Trail Blazers players are not responding to new head coach Chauncey Billups. They certainly didn’t appreciate him using the media to publicly question their drive to compete. The biggest positive about Billups’ inability to motivate the team is that it will be easier to fire him when the new regime takes over and plots the Blazers course for the next few years.
So what should Portland do? Pull the trigger and kill the season. Offer Lillard and Powell for Simmons, Tyrese Maxey, Matisse Thybulle, and a first. Portland gets some youth and athleticism. The Sixers get Dame and a scorer to help make up for the loss of Maxey. Philly President/GM Daryl Moret will also have to throw a future first-round pick to a third team to find salary cap filler for Powell. But that’s no huge undertaking.
Portland’s not a contender as currently constructed anyway, so why not tear it down? See what McCollum does as the primary scorer on a team. Ben Simmons will be ecstatic to play in a smaller market and may bounce back. The Rip City backcourt would be crowded. Then again, there will be interest around the league in most of the young guards. The worst case is they become trade assets. What do they have to lose at this point?
Time to make a choice
The Portland Trail Blazers are standing on the edge of oblivion and have a choice to make. They can either step forward and free-fall into an annual invite to the play-in tournament. Or they can take a step back to take two more steps forward, hopefully. The rest of the season will tell us all we need to know about the direction of the franchise.
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