Portland Trail Blazers president of basketball operations Neil Olshey made his first major move of the season on Monday trading Mason Plumlee and a 2018 second round pick to the Denver Nuggets in exchange for center Jusuf Nurkic and a 2017 first round pick.
Olshey did not hold a press conference following the move but he did do a brief interview with Blazers television reporter Brooke Olzendam, discussing the Plumlee-Nurkic swap, Portland’s approach to the trade market and how he views the remainder of the season.
Here is the full transcript of the interview. The questions have been paraphrased for clarity. The answers are posted verbatim.
Why trade Mason Plumlee and why right now?
Olshey: Well, you know, look Mason’s impending free agency was certainly a factor. We love Mason. We’re going to miss him around here. We wouldn’t have been in the second round of the playoffs last year without him. But there’s certain realities to managing our (salary) cap. We felt like we needed to get younger at the center position. We wanted more of a low post player, someone that could defend size, strength. We found that with Jusuf. And, look, this is the hard part of the business is you have guys that you get attached … but you’ve got to make business decisions. We felt like in the long run this will pay longer dividends, having a young guy on a rookie scale (contract). We manage our cap with it. He gives us a different look defensively. He’s a big time rebounder. And I think he’ll make the game easier for guys like Dame (Lillard) and CJ (McCollum) because we’ve got more presence in the paint now defensively.
The Feb. 23 trade deadline is fast approaching and, naturally, fans are curious if there will be more movies. Can you speak to that?
Olshey: Well, we’re active. You know I think this roster was always going to be a work in progress. We have the benefit of having Paul Allen as an owner. He let us retain all of our players. It wasn’t realistic to think we could manage that cap going forward. But what it did do is it put us in a position to keep as much as possible, put us in a position to compete, but knowing at some point we’re going to have to make some moves. I think Mason is an example of that. It’s not a player we wanted to lose. But the reality is from a cap standpoint we needed to go average down the salary but maintain our ability to compete, you know, now and in the future with not losing someone at that position. I can’t speak to any specifics, but what I can tell you is the league is very active right now. What we’re most excited with is having three picks in this draft. We’ve done a very nice job in the draft so far whether it’s using draft picks to acquire players like we did with Robin Lopez or Mason Plumlee or drafting guys like Dame and CJ and AC (Allen Crabbe). We’re excited about the prospect of that. It’s a big time draft. It’s got incredible depth. We’ll be excited about it in June but we now also have those tools for the next 10 days to put it in play if a player that will impact our win total comes available.
How would you like to see the rest of this season play out?
Olshey: I want to see us just to continue to compete. It’s ironic. We’ve been in a lot of games. Terry and the players have done a great job of making comebacks, keeping us competitive and a lot of them some 50-50 balls just haven’t gone our way. Some other teams have made big time shots and ours haven’t gone down. We’re probably a six point swing overall from being a six or a seven seed versus where we are today. So we’re right there. Right on the cusp. We miss ET (Evan Turner) obviously. It will take a while for Jusuf to get acclimated to our system, but we’re always going to compete. Being led by guys like Dame and CJ we have a chance to win every night. And that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep rolling the ball out there and giving ourselves the best chance to win. We’re going to compete for that last playoff spot, but we’re also going to take a long term view to building the roster.
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