Buck doesn’t stop at Olshey —At least, he says it doesn’t
Neil Olshey conducts a press conference not so much to inform the media as to educate them.
When the Trail Blazers’ president of basketball operations (general manager) believes the narrative about his team and the job he is doing is off-kilter, he’ll gather the scribes and set them straight.
Olshey has long been president of the Neil Olshey Fan Club, and when membership gets low, he does what he can to drum up the numbers.
That’s what he did during a Monday Zoom conference with local reporters, whose collective wisdom, he is quite sure, fits neatly on the head of a pin. Not only does Olshey not suffer fools gladly, he enjoys delivering a proverbial kick in the tush when he deems it necessary.
Pondering what’s happening with Damian Lillard, Ethan Thompson, Chris Duarte and Terry Porter …
Ruminations on roundball heading into the weekend …
• There is plenty of consternation in Rip City over the NBA’s “snub” of Damian Lillard as a starter in the upcoming All-Star Game. You fans who are up in arms: Sit down right now. You still have a chance to win the “Biofreeze Hoop With Dame” contest, where you can shoot it out with Lillard and win up to $100,000. (Personally, I’d rather have it out with Brooke Olzendam in ping pong.).
On the Trail Blazers’ lousy start, Hassan Whiteside and my former boss, Alabama’s long snapper, a Texas grad assistant and all those $$ tossed around in college football
Things on my mind as we kick off a new (and hopefully far better) year …
• A statistical analysis of the Trail Blazers’ disappointing seven-game start to the 2020-21 campaign portends that the local NBA quintet is fortunate to be 3-4.
The off-season emphasis by general manager Neil Olshey was help at the defensive end, something that was a near-constant during Terry Stotts’ first eight years as coach.