Portland Trail Blazers fans have been clamoring for Neil Olshey’s firing year after year and the angry mob is only growing as time passes on. The movement only gained momentum when he spearheaded the Blazers decision to name troubled former star Chauncey Billups as the next head coach.
Fans were understandably upset over the general manager’s choice to hire an underqualified, morally suspect candidate to usher in the next era of Rip City basketball.
Shortly after, Oregon Public Broadcasting released an exposé that revealed that Olshey and the organization’s internal investigation into Billups sexual assault case wasn’t nearly as thorough or trustworthy as the general manager implied it to be in the presser to introduce Billups.
Neil Olshey could be the first domino to fall in a complete overturn of the Portland Trail Blazers organization
Early Saturday morning on July 17th, just before 7 AM Portland time, Henry Abbott reported that superstar Damian Lillard is mere days away from submitting a formal trade request.
According to Olshey himself, the responsibility to keep Lillard content and loyal to the Trail Blazers lies on his shoulders via Oregon Live.
Dame’s happiness always revolves around winning and having a chance to win at the highest level… But the ultimate responsibility for that falls on me and my staff to put a team together that we can walk into the beginning of the season and think it has a chance to compete for a championship.”
The hope is that if Lillard’s camp did in fact leak a possible trade request, it’s really to leverage the organization into firing Neil Olshey.
While moving on from the subpar manager would be a step in the right direction, it might not turn the Blazers into contenders around Dame as many would hope. The reality is that Portland might have waited too long to bring in a new GM capable of building a championship-caliber squad around their superstar point guard.
Olshey has been the most constant and loudest advocate for keeping the Blazers band together and running it back under their newly acquired head coach. There’s a strong possibility, if not hope, that a new general manager would decide to blow it up and rebuild in their own vision around Dame.
However, that possibility could include moving on from Damian Lillard, even if he ultimately only wanted Olshey out of Portland. Resetting the roster entirely and launching a rebuild would give Olshey’s replacement more time to build and less pressure to immediately craft a contender out of a foundation that is quickly crumbling.
There is reason to believe that all of this is just smoke with no substance, though.
Lillard is signed through 2025, so there’s no reason for the Blazers to trade him for less than a Smaug-level treasure horde. And even though there are reports that the OPB piece could be the final straw for Olshey‘s tenure in Portland, nothing in this league is guaranteed. Even if he were fired, the first step to building a contender is landing a superstar, so ultimately, the wise move would be to retool around Lillard.
While it’s certainly not a guarantee, there’s more than a zero percent chance that an Olshey firing could mean the end of the Blazers as we know it.
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July 17, 2021 at 01:36AM
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Portland Trail Blazers Rumors: What firing Neil Olshey would really mean - Rip City Project
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