The most disappointing part of the last two weeks for the Portland Trail Blazers hasn’t been the departure of a player.
LaMarcus Aldridge is going back to his home state to compete for a championship with one of the best franchises in sports. It’d be one thing if he’d gone to Los Angeles or Phoenix, but Aldridge going to the Spurs makes so much sense it’s hard to be mad.
Everyone in Portland can be happy for Wes Matthews, one of the most worthy fan favorites in this city in years. He’s getting, thanks to DeAndre Jordan, max money from Dallas and a chance to bounce back from one of the most debilitating injuries in sports.
Robin Lopez was fun and quirky, but obviously not the game-changer his new team in New York is paying him to be.
Nic Batum? He was forever an enigma, and the Blazers got tired of waiting for him to come good and be worth all the money he was making and guaranteed to make.
It’s rough when a good team breaks up. It was rough when Brandon Roy’s Blazer era came to an end. What’s happened to the Blazers in this free agency period is almost unprecedented. 80% of the starting lineup of a playoff team, gone. Just like that.
Matthews, Aldridge, and Lopez took either more money or a better situation. Batum got traded. That stuff is understandable. It’s sad. But that’s sports.
You want disappointing?
The Blazers fired assistant coach Kim Hughes on July 4th. Hughes’ offense, as everyone knows by now, was giving a television interview at Meyers Leonard’s basketball camp in Terre Haute, Indiana in which he said that LaMarcus Aldridge was leaving Portland.
That was hardly news; the problem was that Hughes said Aldridge was leaving before the beginning of free agency.
Neil Olshey said that it was his call to fire Hughes last Thursday. He said it hurt him on a personal level, pointed out that he was the guy who brought Hughes with him from the Los Angeles Clippers to the Blazers in 2012.
Apparently all that didn’t matter much in the final reckoning, though. So as if the Blazers losing 4/5’s of their starting lineup wasn’t enough, they’ve decided to ax a key assistant coach too.
Hughes made a mistake. He put his foot in his mouth. So what? Aldridge didn’t leave because Hughes said he was going to leave. As was pointed out time and again in the wake of his comments, Hughes had absolutely no knowledge or influence in Portland’s free agency workings.
Don’t the Blazers have bigger fish to fry? Or did they really decide that it would be better to risk Meyers Leonard’s development and scapegoat an assistant coach to distract from one of the most spectacular implosions of an NBA contender in recent memory for five minutes?
Olshey looks terrible. This is the kind of dumb, petty move that has given the Blazers a terrible reputation in NBA circles – it harkens back to a time when all anyone could talk about was how paranoid and self-important Paul Allen’s operation was.
Maybe not a whole lot has changed.
By all accounts, Hughes is a tremendous coach. He has a long, distinguished track record in the NBA. He’s extremely close with Leonard, whose improvement last year down the stretch was one of the bright spots of the beginning of the end for the Blazers.
Now, Leonard is expected to be one of the Blazers’ stars while his confidant and mentor is gone – and it’s not like Portland is bringing in any new, untested big men, right?
To replace Hughes, Olshey decided to promote video coordinator Jim Moran. Due respect to Moran, but there’s just no way he’s as valuable as Hughes.
Why risk Leonard’s development, and the development of the slew of new big men, to show everyone how tough you are by firing a longtime coach who made an innocent mistake?
A slap on the wrist would have done the job. What Olshey really should have done was just chuckle to himself and moved on.
Hughes was merely speculating like everyone else – though what does it say about Aldridge’s final few months in Portland that one of the team’s assistants was so sure he was leaving even before he’d had a single meeting as a free agent?
It’s an ugly situation. Maybe Olshey felt that Hughes had shown him up preemptively. After all, Olshey made quite a show of refuting ESPN reports that Aldridge told the team he was out in late June.
We all know that Olshey is a performer – but you’re only a performer when you win. When you lose, you’re a fraud.
Olshey’s track record says he’s a good GM. I buy that, and much of what he’s said this offseason, but this team is in for a rough year.
Olshey better hope he’s firmly in the good graces of Allen and Co., because the boss doesn’t usually take losing well. Or winning, for that matter. Just ask Kevin Pritchard.
The only things the Blazers have going for them are Damian Lillard, great fans, and Terry Stotts – and who knows how much longer he’s going to be around?
We don’t know where this rebuild is going. Maybe the Blazers are back in the playoffs in two or three years, maybe not. There are only two things we know for certain: One is that this team is rebuilding, and considering where there were just a few months ago, that is a gut-punch.
The other thing is that, irrespective of anything else, Kim Hughes fell victim to an all-too-familiar routine.
Firing Hughes was needless. It was idiocy. At the end of the day, it’s the little moments like these that make up the DNA of organizations. You’d never see the Spurs do something like this.
But the Blazers? It’s what they’ve been about for years.
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