TRADE: McCollum+Nance+Snell to NOP | Hart+Sato+Walker-Alex+Louzada+1st+2 2nds to POR

[DanSchwartzgan]

They might have out-MBT'ed the MBT with what they returned they turned Trent Jr. into and now the CJ compensation.

Below is Hollinger's take on Portland cleaning house.  New GM not the same as the old GM and has undone almost everything Olshey did in the last few years.  Do we know any other teams that recently changed out GM's?  Obviously Cuban is still here, but undoing the KP deal and trading away THJ would be quite the "Donnie doesn't live here any more" move.

Portland gets a do-over on late Olshey era

Sending out McCollum, Nance and Snell four days after trading Robert Covington and Norman Powell, the Blazers essentially undid all of former general manager Neil Olshey’s moves over the past three seasons, with the exception of drafting Anfernee Simons. (He’ll be staying, thanks.)

This isn’t the place for a longer exposition on Olshey’s career track record, which contained some great hits and some oops misses just like nearly anyone’s with an extended tenure. The larger point is that the Blazers in recent years kept digging themselves into a deeper hole with older, more expensive players and fewer draft picks, and it culminated this season in a team that was both quite average and quite old.

The original sin was the eye-popping extension for McCollum. From there, the Blazers kept digging themselves into bigger salary-cap holes with each successive move. Two firsts and Trevor Ariza turned into Covington, a failed signing of Derrick Jones Jr. turned into Nance and cost another first and a genuinely great draft pick (Gary Trent Jr.) begat a five-year deal for Powell.


Just like that, it’s all undone. The Blazers dropped off underperforming deals on Nance, Covington and McCollum, got out of the luxury tax, added a likely lottery pick, three seconds and a 20-year-old 2021 first-rounder, have a $21 million trade exception, added a legitimately good player on a decent contract in Hart and didn’t have to take back any dead money or bad contracts.