It would be immensely informative to be a fly on the wall of the office of Portland Trail Blazers general manager Neil Olshey. Which teams is he talking to around the league? Which players is he pursuing? Which Blazers players are available in trade talks?
Unfortunately, that's not possible.
Olshey did, however, sit down recently for a 30-minute interview with Blazers sideline reporter Brooke Olzendam. And the interview, published Wednesday, does provide some new insight into the moves Portland has and hasn't made this offseason.
Olzendam deserves credit. She's a good reporter. She sat across from her boss and asked the kind of tough, pointed questions Blazers fans have been asking all summer.
Questions like why didn't Olshey sign any playoff-proven veterans like he said he was going to? And why would he let fan favorite and talented backup center Ed Davis walk in free agency?
Scroll past the video to read a partial transcript of the interview:
VIDEO: Watch the complete interview
What can we expect to see from [Zach Collins] in season 2?
Zach Collins was the No. 1 defender at summer league. ...He gave up 0.227 points per possession when he was on the floor. It's an insane number.
I think a lot of that has to do with how much stronger he is. He can hold his ground in the post, he absorbs contact at the rim with verticality and he hasn't lost any of his quickness, which is the key.
We've gone through this before where guys have tried to change their bodies, whether they got bigger or whether they got stronger or they lost weight, and it's affected their mobility, their strength and their basketball functionality.
Zach actually got better with it.
From a balance standpoint, he got moved around a little bit in the low post last year. His center of gravity is going to be better. His core is better. Physically, guys look at him as a bigger player now because of the weight and the muscle that he's put on.
Going into this offseason, you had said you wanted to look for NBA veteran leaders to really help you come playoff time. We actually ended up getting younger. Why the change of plans?
The market dictates that.
We identified five wings that all had playoff experience or veteran wings we thought we could get for the taxpayer midlevel. They all got either significantly more, or they're in markets where they'll become early bird players or they'll have no state income tax, which adds to the value of the contract.
Editor's note: Olshey didn't reveal which five players the Blazers pursued. But we can speculate. They would need to be wings who were signed for more than the taxpayer midlevel exception before the Blazers moved on and agreed to a two-year, $5.6 million contract with Seth Curry, which used up about half of their taxpayer exception.
We already know the Blazers targeted Mario Hezonja, who signed with the Knicks for a one-year, $6.5 million contract instead. Other than Hezonja, other players that fit the criteria above include Rudy Gay (1 year, $10 million with San Antonio), Joe Harris (2 years, $16 million with Brooklyn), Doug McDermott (3 years, $22 million with Indiana), Trevor Ariza (1 year, $15 million with Phoenix), and Marco Belinelli (2 years, $12 million with San Antonio).
What we realized this year was we were going to go through our list, we attacked each guy, we recruited him as hard as possible. When they were able to get compensated at a much higher level than the $5.3 [million] tax midlevel, then we went with talent.
Instead of continually going down the list and trying to make signings that checked some boxes in July, we went with the guys that were younger, that we thought had more talent and higher ceilings that were better for the future. At the end of the day, that ends up paying off.
We've seen it with our own roster, with guys like CJ [McCollum]. Instead of bringing veterans ahead of him, which all that did was sublimate his development — everybody in the gym knew how good he was — but because we were trying to appease the marketplace and try to bring in a guy who had a higher level of trust with the coaching staff, we kept a guy subordinate to him for an extra year, where we would have been far better off playing CJ sooner rather than later. I think it's a lesson we learned.
One of the things we've realized is the guys who have excelled here are the second-draft model players, guys like Moe Harkless, Shabazz [Napier], guys like Jusuf Nurkic. They've really excelled when there's been no impediment to their development, that when the minutes were there to be earned and they earned them, they were able to take over those minutes, as opposed to knowing no matter how well they played, they were going to hit a ceiling because there were veteran incumbents ahead of them.
That said, we were hoping to get those veteran guys, but they had to be good enough to justify impeding the development of our younger players. We tried to walk a very thin line, we didn't keep going down the list and get a lesser-known name who couldn't really help us.
What we did after we got to a certain point, we realized the taxpayer midlevel had been devalued, based on what wings were getting in the marketplace. We needed a combo guard. [Blazers head coach] Terry [Stotts] always likes having a shooting combo that can play on and off the ball with [Damian Lillard] and CJ. We did that with Seth [Curry].
Nic Stauskas is absolutely the prototype of the guys we've had great success with. Really talented, highly drafted. He's been in some difficult situations in the league, needs to find a home. Bringing him in, another guy who shot 40 percent from 3 last season, we needed to add shooting. He handles and makes plays. He'll fit in as well.
We'll stay opportunistic for the rest of the offseason, looking to see that now that basically every team other than Sacramento, who has about $11 million in room, are out of cap room, are teams going to have to start doing business with one another again to upgrade their rosters?
You just spoke on them a little bit, but I want to talk a little bit more about Seth and Nic. When you looked at them, what really stood out to you? They kind of were under the radar, if you will. Why do they fit this team so well?
I think Nik was probably a little under the radar in terms of the timing. We knew we were going to have to fill the roster with a couple of minimum players because we had the tax midlevel [and] we had a couple of minimums. If you sign Nik on July 5, it doesn't have the same resonance in terms of the fan base or the market, but the chronological order doesn't matter.
We felt he was one of the better minimum wings on the market. We feel like he has the right skill set that can be maximized in Terry's system. He can dribble, he can pass, he shot the well from 3 last season, he's a good athlete, needs to find a home. So we went out earlier to get him.
We played the taxpayer midlevel market all the way through until about July 5. We just couldn't outbid teams. It was a very defined negotiation. We only had $5.3 [million]. It was a three-year deal worth about $16.5 million, and we got outbid. At that kind of a price point, guys are going to take the extra million, million-five, over coming to a place that they'd have to take a reduction and you can't even offer a starting role.
With Seth, he had a great year two years ago, he's 100 percent healthy, he's a big-time shooter, he knows how to play. The key with that position, as we've seen with guys in the past whether it's Mo Williams, Steve Blake, Shabazz last year, they have to be able to play with and behind Dame and CJ equally. And we think Seth can do that.
Looking back to earlier in this summer, Ed Davis is no longer on the team. If you look at the fan base, as you know very well, they really took a liking to Ed, especially last year when he was healthy. So just explain more to the fans why it made sense, because I know it was a difficult decision, especially with the chemistry he had with the team and with how gritty a player he was.
He was. Ed was great. It's probably why I was Ed's call at 8:30 the night of free agency asking [if he] should he take the deal that was being offered or shouldn't he, knowing where his market was. I advised him to take it because I really felt like players in that category were going to end up taking minimums if they waited too long.
Going back to what we were talking about, like with CJ, we feel like we have internal solutions that will eventually be upgrades, and that was the deal. Ed is a veteran and you can't bring Ed back and ask him to take on a reduced role. But if Ed comes back and plays the same role, it sublimates guys on the roster that we think have a higher ceiling and that eventually can bring more to the table.
It's not about development over winning. We feel like, when you watch what Zach Collins did in summer league, when you watch some of the issues we faced in the playoffs, in terms of spacing, in terms of floor balance, because of the style of play that Ed plays, it puts us in a position where you watch Dame get blitzed in pick and rolls when he shares the floor with guys. We needed to add more shooting, more floor spacing, more playmaking out of that position.
We talked about it. During the regular season, it was phenomenal. We ran into a really tough matchup in the playoffs. They blitzed every pick and roll. Essentially, it took Nurk out of a lot of the series as well. We really felt like we needed to move on and get guys that can play a style where they can attack switches better in the low post, they can stretch the floor and shoot the ball when Dame is blitzed, if guys aren't going to rotate to the rolling or popping or fading big.
It's not a position anymore where guys are carrying three or four centers. ... You need one center, your starting center, and then you're piece-mealing it behind that guy. We needed to give an opportunity to the guys that were here. We feel like they step into that role better and that they bring something to the table that we were missing and that got exposed during that playoff series.
How pleased are you with the terms you came to with Jusuf Nurkic and what can we expect to see from him in his fifth season?
We are pleased. I think it was a very generous deal, given the situation. Paul [Allen] was great about it for Nurk. He wanted to make sure Nurk walked away happy while still doing what was best for the organization.
He was restricted, he had the opportunity to go out and get an offer sheet. I think he wanted to be here. We wanted him here.
It's a tough time right now in the league for bigs. That's the reality. We're going to more positionless basketball. We're not all trying to be Golden State, but we're not also not carrying a heavy percentage of our cap at the center position.
Timing is everything. Two years ago, you're going to look at comps in the market and wonder why those guys are making more. But if you look at the rest of this summer, Nurk had one of the more lucrative deals in the marketplace while still being very team favorable, in terms of managing our cap and tax position, while knowing long-term, we have him for the next four years.
That gives us a really good runway. We're keeping the core together, knowing Dame and CJ have at least three years left on their contracts. We give that group the best chance to win without impeding our ability long-term, in terms of being into a number that's completely non-liquid.
On the Allen Crabbe trade exception
Honestly, we were caught off guard. We thought for sure the trade exception would have huge value in the league. Teams are just not in the business of giving up quality players like they were, because everybody understands they're going to have to pay the freight this summer for what everybody did back in 2016. There just weren't as many pieces in the marketplace to do the absorption deals we've seen in the past.
I think the impact of Golden State is teams weren't as willing to go give up players to create cap room to chase certain free agents, knowing maybe it doesn't get you over the hump, especially in the Western Conference.
Jared Cowley is a digital producer for KGW. You can reach him at twitter.com/jaredcowley.