Blazers gazing toward Big D to fill vacancy?
Meanwhile, the collapse of talks is holding up teams that still have front-office and assistant coach vacancies.
The Blazers continue to keep their GM search under tight wraps, having told all of the candidates they'd already interviewed over the summer that they were going in another direction and would be looking for executives who'd been in the GM chair for a long time. And the names that many outside of Portland (no one in the 503 is talking, of course) have attached to the job are Utah's Kevin O'Connor and Sacramento's Geoff Petrie. And O'Connor's and Petrie's track records would make them top candidates anywhere.
Last week, though, front-office types began to believe the Blazers might also be doing due diligence on Mavericks GM Donnie Nelson, who helped turn the Mavs from an offense-dominant team that his father, Don, coached to initial success, into a championship team that emphasized defense under coach Rick Carlisle.
Portland president Larry Miller declined comment this weekend, but there's no concrete evidence that the Blazers have asked for permission to speak with Nelson.
The Blazers cleaned out their front office during and after the 2009-10 season, first firing assistant general manager Tom Penn for mysterious and still-unexplained reasons in March, then firing respected GM Kevin Pritchard the day after the 2010 Draft, having let him twist in the wind for weeks before making the move. Pritchard's replacement, former Thunder assistant GM Rich Cho, lasted just a year, after owner Paul Allen met with him in Europe to make sure he was the right fit and after the Blazers lauded the soft-spoken Cho's people skills.
Under Mark Cuban, Nelson has had the freedom to burn up the phone lines in search of a deal, something that Allen has loved to do over the years, buying up Draft picks from anyone who would sell them and never being leery of making big deals. But Allen has grown into more of a financial hawk over the years, and impacted the current collective bargaining talks with an odd appearance Oct. 21 in which he came to a key meeting between owners and the union, yet said next to nothing even when spoken to by union head Billy Hunter.