What do you think is the main problem?

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What is the main contributing factor to the Blazers' poor record?

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Cugel said:
Roster and coach. Billups is probably a fine coach but to think he is "the guy" to help Dame get a title was a bit misguided. Combine that with very very limited assets to actually make deals and you have a team exactly where pundits thought they would be: hovering around the play in but really a completely ignorable team like Washington and the Hornets. The Blazers are as interesting as the Wizards and Hornets. It is a shame but all we can say is "maybe next season".

Only assets that could yield draft captial are Grant, Ant and Shae. Such capital is needed to prise stars away from teams.

I hate to always come back to this but Oshley is still rearing his ugly head. I just doubt Portland will be out of that shadow while Dame is still Dame.
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When people say we don't have draft capital they are wrong. If we had a deal in place that sent out Ant and others, along with three future firsts and three pick swaps... we could have that in a matter of minutes. Usually it only takes cash to remove protections from a pick but a second rounder has been the highest I've seen it take... the only time I've seen more given is when the protection is altered in a way that pushes the pick back not when it is giving the pick immediately.

So if we wanted to we could send a pick swap 2024, FRP 2025, swap 2026, FRP 2027, swap 2028 and FRP 2029. If the move makes this team a contender we have a ton of draft capital at our disposal.
 
Not enough size and too many mediocre players. Need a consolidation trade.
 
blazerkor said:
When people say we don't have draft capital they are wrong. If we had a deal in place that sent out Ant and others, along with three future firsts and three pick swaps... we could have that in a matter of minutes. Usually it only takes cash to remove protections from a pick but a second rounder has been the highest I've seen it take... the only time I've seen more given is when the protection is altered in a way that pushes the pick back not when it is giving the pick immediately.

So if we wanted to we could send a pick swap 2024, FRP 2025, swap 2026, FRP 2027, swap 2028 and FRP 2029. If the move makes this team a contender we have a ton of draft capital at our disposal.
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Does anyone know for sure if Chicago has to approve for us to remove the protection or if we can do it unilaterally?
 
PtldPlatypus said:
I'm the only one who selected effort, so I assume this will be an unpopular opinion. I feel like they are, on the whole, passive. Early in the season, they attacked the rim consistently, they pressed up defensively on the perimeter, they pushed the ball up the court, and that has mostly disappeared. Perhaps there's a confidence issue; perhaps it's a function of injuries limiting their depth; perhaps it's an effort to limit turnovers... whatever it is, it just feels like the aggressiveness is gone.
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I selected Billups, but lack of effort by the players was a close second to me. I think those two choices are closely tied together.

Totally agree that the effort early in the season has dropped. I went to the Philadelphia game this week, and the first half was littered with lazy passes, and slow close outs by the Blazers. When the Blazers made the run in the 4th, we finally started seeing Nurk get up in the face of Embiid. There was pressure in the backcourt. Quicker close outs on 3s.

Why can’t the Blazers play with that effort in the first half? If your answer is that you have to conserve your energy for the full game, the teams that are beating the Blazers don’t seem to have that problem…
 
The guards don't work....again. Trade for Collins and play him at PF, let Nurk develop his 3, move Grant to the three and ride the year out with Sharpe at SG. Rotate Winslow in for Nurk heavily when healthy.
 
UKRAINEFAN said:
Does anyone know for sure if Chicago has to approve for us to remove the protection or if we can do it unilaterally?
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Yeah, we all know for sure that as soon as trade conditions are agreed upon and ratified by the players' physicals, any changes to those trade conditions have to be agreed upon by any parties impacted by those conditions. What we also know is that conditions have been lifted from picks that make them guaranteed for cash most of the time it has happened.
 
bemac said:
The guards don't work....again. Trade for Collins and play him at PF, let Nurk develop his 3, move Grant to the three and ride the year out with Sharpe at SG. Rotate Winslow in for Nurk heavily when healthy.
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That would have to be a three team deal because I very seriously doubt that the Hawks want a small, score first guard at 22M with Trae making 37M but maybe they want him for a rotation with Trae and Dejounte. I just don't think that would be a wise trade for Atlanta to make without another team involved.
 
bemac said:
The guards don't work....again. Trade for Collins and play him at PF, let Nurk develop his 3, move Grant to the three and ride the year out with Sharpe at SG. Rotate Winslow in for Nurk heavily when healthy.
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Then after we win 35 games, what do we do next?
 
Tince said:
Then after we win 35 games, what do we do next?
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We wait...I don't think there's a viable trade to make this a championship team. The best path forward is to make incremental improvements until Sharpe becomes. Yep, it's a gamble, but I think it's the best bet. Accelerating his progression by giving him serious minutes is the way to go.
 
Tince said:
Then after we win 35 games, what do we do next?
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The fact is, if that trade is available this coaching staff has already shown that they will start Josh over Shae. So you'd be looking at Dame, Josh, JG, Collins and Nurk with GP2, Nas, Justise (all if healthy) and Shae coming off the bench. I would think that Shae would sub in for Nurk and the lineup would be Dame, Shae, Josh, JG and Collins at first sub. I think Collins would play a lot of minutes as a small ball 5. I think that team wins just over 41 games and is in the play-in. It's not my ideal trade or if we did make it, I'd want more moves with it. I've already said that Ant shouldn't be appealing to the Hawks, so I doubt this deal will be anything for you to worry about.
 
UKRAINEFAN said:
Does anyone know for sure if Chicago has to approve for us to remove the protection or if we can do it unilaterally?
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I can't say for certain but I'd imagine that Portland could NOT remove protections without Chicago's approval

for example, say Chicago and Portland were competing to assemble the best trade package for Siakam, and the Raptors main priority, after salary matching, was the value of the future picks offered. Portland's heavy disadvantage, and conversely Chicago's biggest advantage, would be the fact that Portland has no unencumbered 1st round picks to offer. Chicago would not destroy that advantage by letting Portland off of Olshey's idiotic hook. In fact, owning Portland's encumbered first thru 2028 (all for Nance...geeeeezuz) might be an asset Toronto would like
 
42N8Bounce said:
Why can’t the Blazers play with that effort in the first half? If your answer is that you have to conserve your energy for the full game, the teams that are beating the Blazers don’t seem to have that problem…
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Because they get called for ticky tack fouls. Every time our front court gets in foul trouble early on we have to dial back our defense and end up loosing the game.
 
bemac said:
We wait...I don't think there's a viable trade to make this a championship team. The best path forward is to make incremental improvements until Sharpe becomes. Yep, it's a gamble, but I think it's the best bet. Accelerating his progression by giving him serious minutes is the way to go.
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I'm not against waiting, but obviously there are people here who are. We turned over a large portion of the roster in the last 365 days and a lot of people already want to blow it up.

I think the most likely outcome of your strategy is people go from blame CJ, to blaming Ant, to blaming Sharpe. The backup QB is everyones favorite, until they get paid and moved to the starting lineup, then people love to turn on them.
 
blazerkor said:
The fact is, if that trade is available this coaching staff has already shown that they will start Josh over Shae. So you'd be looking at Dame, Josh, JG, Collins and Nurk with GP2, Nas, Justise (all if healthy) and Shae coming off the bench. I would think that Shae would sub in for Nurk and the lineup would be Dame, Shae, Josh, JG and Collins at first sub. I think Collins would play a lot of minutes as a small ball 5. I think that team wins just over 41 games and is in the play-in. It's not my ideal trade or if we did make it, I'd want more moves with it. I've already said that Ant shouldn't be appealing to the Hawks, so I doubt this deal will be anything for you to worry about.
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Agreed on the first part regarding who would start.

Regarding the second part, I'm certainly not going to worry about it. Never was.
 
wizenheimer said:
I can't say for certain but I'd imagine that Portland could NOT remove protections without Chicago's approval

for example, say Chicago and Portland were competing to assemble the best trade package for Siakam, and the Raptors main priority, after salary matching, was the value of the future picks offered. Portland's heavy disadvantage, and conversely Chicago's biggest advantage, would be the fact that Portland has no unencumbered 1st round picks to offer. Chicago would not destroy that advantage by letting Portland off of Olshey's idiotic hook. In fact, owning Portland's encumbered first thru 2028 (all for Nance...geeeeezuz) might be an asset Toronto would like
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Yeah, you can come up with that one obscure scenario that if Portland and Chicago wanted the same player and the team with that player wanted a package of picks Chicago wouldn't want to let us free up our future picks. The biggest problem with that though is that Chicago would have to guarantee their pick this year to Orlando and if we're being so fucking obscure maybe Orlando doesn't want to free up Chicago's future draft pick for some obscure reason.

If we wanted to, we could guarantee that pick unless a very very unlikely scenario was going on. In other words in all likelihood we could have a lot of draft capital if we wanted to.
 
Nhawz said:
It’s the roster. Cronin has made it clear this roster is a work in progress. We did a major retool during the off-season, and haven’t done fine tuning. We started out hot which skewed a lot of your perceptions of our current roster.
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Bingo.
 
Nhawz said:
It’s the roster. Cronin has made it clear this roster is a work in progress. We did a major retool during the off-season, and haven’t done fine tuning. We started out hot which skewed a lot of your perceptions of our current roster.
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Everybody here is wrong and this woman/man is correct. Close the thread.
 
Nhawz said:
It’s the roster. Cronin has made it clear this roster is a work in progress. We did a major retool during the off-season, and haven’t done fine tuning. We started out hot which skewed a lot of your perceptions of our current roster.
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It is the roster... but why does it matter than Cronin said that?

Is that supposed to excuse that he's put together a mediocre roster that has a ton of money guaranteed to a few players well into the future and two of our best players about to be free agents?

If he had made moves for the future (trading Dame, for example) a "wait and see" approach would make sense. If he had acquired draft capital for some of the guys he moved, or gotten any young players of consequence in the deals he made, I'd be more willing to listen. As it is, he didn't do that. Other than drafting Sharpe, he's merely traded for different veterans (on expiring deals), given current players way more than they would have received anywhere else, and lit a lot of cash on fire when he signed Payton for some reason.

Every GM can say, "Let me make this clear: the roster is a work in progress"... but who cares? What roster is NOT? Why should a GM be excused for not making the team better (in the present or into the future) merely because he says that?
 
The problem is pretty simple, we have shitty ownership that doesn’t care as much about winning as it does about profit paired with a 2nd year GM/HC combo that has assembled a roster full of runts. Zero fucking size, and the size we do have plays small.
 
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The problem is our guards and Nurk cannot guard a chair. Maybe time to start Eubanks and Little. Bring Ant off the bench and trade Nurk for a mobile big man. If it's not that then do something else, but at least try!
Or just keep doing what we are doing so we get the best pick possible next year.
 
There is a massive lack of size/length, and they get 'out-physicalled' on a nightly basis.

8 players are 6'6" and under and 11 players that are 6'8" or less....that is staggering amount of lack of size on an NBA roster. That is very much on Neil and now partially on Joe.

Until that is fixed, it won't get better. They are last in the league in opponent shots at the rim. Their perimeter defenders don't keep anyone out of the lane, and then they don't have the size (Drew) or athleticism (Nurk) to deter many of those attempts. How long will it take to fix? Dame only has so many years left.
 
GiaDiama said:
The problem is our guards and Nurk cannot guard a chair. Maybe time to start Eubanks and Little. Bring Ant off the bench and trade Nurk for a mobile big man. If it's not that then do something else, but at least try!
Or just keep doing what we are doing so we get the best pick possible next year.
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Fortunately, Nurk doesn't have to guard a chair. At various times during his career he has had elite defensive numbers. He's still a far better team defender than Eubanks. Don't let Eubanks' sexy blocks mislead you: he's the white Montrezl Harrell - he flatters to deceive, and is deservedly a bench player (and probably not even that on a good team). But what Nurk is, is maddeningly inconsistent. He was our best player in the two games against Dallas, the last time we looked dominant against a half-decent team. But he's just a fucking foul magnet.
 
TBpup said:
There is a massive lack of size/length, and they get 'out-physicalled' on a nightly basis.

8 players are 6'6" and under and 11 players that are 6'8" or less....that is staggering amount of lack of size on an NBA roster. That is very much on Neil and now partially on Joe.

Until that is fixed, it won't get better. They are last in the league in opponent shots at the rim. Their perimeter defenders don't keep anyone out of the lane, and then they don't have the size (Drew) or athleticism (Nurk) to deter many of those attempts. How long will it take to fix? Dame only has so many years left.
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Smaller than a lot of college rosters
 
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