Wednesday, June 30, 2021
Will the Bucks have enough to beat the Hawks without Giannis Antetokounmpo? | SportsCenter - ESPN
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NBA Mock Draft 2021: Cade Cunningham still No. 1; Evan Mobley-Jalen Green debate rages; combine causes changes - CBS Sports
The 2021 NBA Draft is less than a month away, the lottery balls have worked their magic and the Draft Combine is complete, which means we've entered the most reliable and predictable pre-draft phase: smokescreen season.
They've already started, but expect reports to come flying in hot and heavy over the next few weeks mentioning how certain teams are higher than others on certain players, and vice versa. Make sure you take all of them with a grain of salt, as there are countless motivations for teams to send out false signals to somehow make their position more advantageous. Remember last year when the Golden State Warriors reportedly weren't blown away by James Wiseman? They ended up taking him No. 2 overall.
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So when you hear that the Houston Rockets, who hold the No. 2 pick in this year's draft, reportedly favor Jalen Green over Evan Mobley, it would behoove you to keep a somewhat skeptical eye on the situation. One thing remains steadfast, however, and that is the belief that Cade Cunningham will in fact be the No. 1 pick in the draft. There could always be a curveball trade, but as the lottery currently stands, that means he'll be suiting up for the Detroit Pistons.
After that it's much murkier, with an incredible amount of talent loaded at the top, and a few dark horses who are making their way up draft boards, thanks to strong combine performances and workouts. With that in mind, here is my latest mock draft, with some significant changes from my pre-lottery edition completed a few weeks ago.
NBA Mock Draft
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NBA Mock Draft 2021: Cade Cunningham still No. 1; Evan Mobley-Jalen Green debate rages; combine causes changes - CBS Sports
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Billups, Olshey Press Conference Causes Further Harm to Blazers Fans - Blazer's Edge
Yesterday the Portland Trail Blazers introduced new Head Coach Chauncey Billups in a press conference led by President of Basketball Operations Neil Olshey. The event carried the burden of answering concerns over a civil lawsuit Billups settled in 2000 regarding an accusation of sexual assault in 1997, when he was a rookie with the Boston Celtics. Both members of the wider Blazers community and media members had expressed concern over the hiring. The organization understood that questions were coming.
Billlups and Olshey addressed the matter during their opening remarks, but shut down further inquiries by the media, leading to frustration and consternation among many observers.
In today’s Dave and Dia Podcast, co-hosts Dave Deckard and Dia Miller share their thoughts about the press conference. They examine it from a public relations standpoint, its effect on fans and listeners, and the not-so-veiled message to people with questions, especially victims of assault or sexual violence. Whether the event succeed or failed depended on what it was designed to do. Dave and Dia look at the set-up, the statements of both participants, and the reactions to media questions, positing that the press conference did exactly what it was meant to do.
Most observers concentrated on the team refusing (in obvious and pre-planned fashion) to respond to inquiries. The actual comments were either praised or given a pass. If you listen closely, perhaps they shouldn’t have been. A consistent line ran through the event, and it was neither empathetic nor pretty.
If you’re at all interested in these issues, or want to learn something about the reality of dealing with sexual assault in the world at large—or just being a woman in the male-dominated world of sports and sports media—you need to listen to this podcast. There’s an argument to be made that EVERYTHING about the day, including the post-event analysis, was part of the problem...a problem that needs addressing not just here, but across the NBA.
You can listen to the episode by clicking here or on the embed below.
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Tribunal Convicts Former Serbian Officials of Crimes in Balkan Wars - The New York Times
It was the first time in the three decades of the tribunal’s history that top officials in the wartime Serbian government were found guilty of playing a role in atrocities in neighboring countries.
For the first time high-ranking officials from the 1990s wartime government in Serbia were linked to involvement in atrocities in neighboring countries, as a war-crimes tribunal in The Hague on Wednesday convicted two former Serbian officials of aiding and abetting war crimes committed in the wars that ravaged the Balkans at that time.
The case was the final one to be heard by the international criminal tribunal established by the United Nations to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Balkan wars. The verdict capped dozens of trials that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, a conflict that unleashed waves of sectarian and ethnic fighting.
Coming nearly three decades after the tribunal was established, the case was also a coda for the protracted legal struggle to hold accountable the architects and perpetrators of the worst bloodletting in Europe since the end of World War II. It was the last chance for prosecutors to tie officials from the Serbian state to atrocities in neighboring Bosnia and Croatia.
Few Serbian officials played as critical a role during the conflicts as the defendants Jovica Stanisic, the former head of Serbia’s state security, and Franko Simatovic, his deputy.
The presiding judge, Burton Hall, announced the findings on Wednesday afternoon, saying that the court found that the defendants were guilty of participating in a “joint criminal enterprise” to remove non-Serbs from areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In so doing, the court found, they created “an atmosphere of terror, arbitrary detentions and forced labor.”
“This common criminal purpose,” the judge said, “was shared by certain senior political, military, and police leadership in Serbia” as well as others in parts of Croatia and Bosnia. Although he named no individuals, lawyers at the court said this inevitably also pointed to President Slobodan Milosevic.
Tying the crimes to Belgrade was a significant legal victory, but the findings were limited in scope, focusing on one Bosnian municipality, and the court rejected a vast majority of the prosecution’s charges. The sentences also fell far short of what prosecutors wanted: Mr. Stanisic and Mr. Simatovic were both sentenced to 12 years in prison, including time served.
Despite that, Wayne Jordash, Mr. Stanisic’s lawyer, said he would appeal the conviction and called the sentences “manifestly excessive.”
Kada Hotic, a representative for a Bosnian war victims association, told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network that she was satisfied with the verdict even if disappointed by what she said was a light sentence.
“All in all, they are guilty,” she said. And Serbia, she said, had finally been shown to be involved in the crimes.
Prosecutors said Mr. Stanisic was the second most powerful man in Serbia from 1992 to 1995, when Mr. Milosevic was president. He was a trusted consigliere and keen strategist who was nicknamed “Ledeni” — Serbian for “ice man.”
Known for his sharp suits and dark sunglasses, Mr. Stanisic presented an image of calm. By contrast, Mr. Simatovic, the head of special operations, was a more effusive man who preferred camouflage uniforms and, according to evidence presented during the trials, could be heard bragging about attacks on villages.
Prosecutors accused the pair of organizing hit squads, permitting the killing of prisoners and signing off on covert weapons shipments. Mr. Stanisic and Mr. Simatovic were charged with creating and running a series of covert operations using brutal paramilitary groups and acting on the orders of Mr. Milosevic.
Prosecutors said that they were part of a criminal conspiracy to force non-Serbs out of large sections of Croatia and Bosnia — a campaign that brought a new term to the grim lexicon of warfare: “ethnic cleansing.”
The tribunal, despite criticism over the length of the trials, has set many important precedents in international criminal law and has provided victims a chance to give voice to what they witnessed and experienced.
The tribunal expanded on the body of international law established at the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II. And as other courts followed it, dealing with Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Cambodia, many believe the tribunal provided the momentum for the founding of the permanent International Criminal Court.
In all, the tribunal has conducted more than 80 trials, many with multiple defendants. It has convicted 91 people and acquitted 18, while others have died while in custody in The Hague, at least three by suicide.
More than 100,000 people died during the conflagrations from 1991 to 1995, and about two million people were displaced from their homes.
The tribunal was founded in 1993 in response to the mass atrocities unfolding at the time in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina. From the outset, it has faced criticism, skepticism and political pushback.
In Serbia, it has effectively been branded as anti-Serb. Across the region, many of those who have been convicted of war crimes are still viewed as heroes. And in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the rulings have done little to repair the deep divisions still tearing at the seams of the divided society.
But the tribunal did establish a robust historical record and made clear that Bosnian Muslims made up by far the wars’ largest group of victims.
Mr. Milosevic, considered the main architect of the Balkan wars, faced a battery of charges. But he died in a tribunal cell in 2006, shortly before the end of his trial.
The trials and convictions of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the supreme political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, were widely viewed as rare victories for international justice.
They were convicted of the gravest crimes that have come under the purview of the court, and of those that had by far the largest number of victims, including the massacre of about 8,000 unarmed men and boys in Srebrenica, in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Still, the leaders of Serbia itself — long accused as the main instigators of the wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia — have largely escaped prosecution. Before Wednesday’s verdict, no officials of the Belgrade government during the war had served time for the atrocities in Bosnia or Croatia.
Some senior Serbian officials have been convicted of crimes in the conflict over the independence of Kosovo in 1999.
Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, said that to end the work of the tribunal “without holding the Serbian enablers of the crimes accountable would have left the tribunal’s task incomplete.”
The closest the court came was in the conviction of Mr. Milosevic’s chief of staff, Gen. Momcilo Perisic, who was sentenced to 27 years for aiding and abetting war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia. But the verdict was overturned on appeal in 2013.
The judges did not dispute the evidence of Serbia’s wartime role, or of its continuous supply of weapons, money, fuel and personnel to its allies in Bosnia and Croatia. But the judges argued that there was no evidence that this extensive support was intended to be used for crimes, rather than for what they deemed to be legitimate war efforts.
Since that verdict was overturned, prosecutors have been struggling to find a way to establish the crucial link that legally tied many war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia to the Serbian State Security and by extension to its boss, Mr. Milosevic.
It has been more than three years since the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague closed, and the successor institution, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, was the official venue for the last trial.
Like many war crimes trials, the case against Mr. Stanisic and his deputy has been complex and drawn out, stretching back to their indictment in 2003. The two men were acquitted at a trial in 2013, but appeals judges, finding fundamental legal and factual errors, overturned that verdict two years later and ordered a full retrial.
The prosecution relied on dozens of witnesses, scores of videos and radio and telephone intercepts to try to establish that the two men were part of an organized conspiracy that orchestrated the forcible and permanent removal of the majority of non-Serbs from parts of Croatia and Bosnia.
Prosecutors introduced newly obtained records from Serbian secret police archives, which included details about the paramilitary recruits and payments to them. Payments to a group called the Red Berets were signed by Mr. Simatovic.
The secret records were provided by Belgrade, and prosecutors said that they showed that these groups — with names like Arkan’s Tigers, the Scorpions, the Gray Wolves and the White Eagles — were not informal bands of criminals or men who spontaneously took up arms, but well-trained, well-equipped and well-paid men in uniforms.
Prosecutors said that these groups were tasked with doing the dirty work during ethnic cleansing operations.
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Kim Jong Un says pandemic has caused 'great crisis' in North Korea - NBC News
North Korea was one of the few places to claim it has had zero cases of Covid-19.
But its leader, Kim Jong Un, now says his secretive country faces "a great crisis" related to the pandemic, blaming this on the mismanagement of his own party bureaucrats, state media reported Wednesday.
Relatively little is known about the coronavirus situation in North Korea, a totalitarian state where Kim's regime controls the media and most other aspects of public life.
Officials in the United States and elsewhere have questioned whether North Korea has actually escaped the virus entirely. The only other nonisland nation to make this Covid-free claim is the authoritarian and secretive Turkmenistan, in central Asia.
Shedding some rare light on his own country, Kim criticized "senior officials in charge of important state affairs" who had "neglected" certain unspecified decisions related to the "emergency epidemic prevention campaign associated with the worldwide health crisis," the state-controlled KCNA news agency reported Wednesday.
While Kim did not used the words "Covid-19" directly, according to KCNA, he said that the actions of his officials had caused "a great crisis" in terms of "ensuring the security of the state and safety of the people," warning that this had "entailed grave consequences."
Kim was speaking Tuesday at a politburo meeting of the Workers' Party of Korea, the ruling party of North Korea founded by Kim's grandfather, Kim Il Sung.
During the meeting Kim also replaced several members of the politburo, although the KCNA report did not say whether this was related to the charges of "chronic irresponsibility and incompetence" that he leveled at party cadres during the meeting.
Kim did not go into detail about the "crisis" that he described. As is often the case, it is up to outside officials and experts to try to decipher the tidbits published by KCNA.
When asked about Kim's remarks, South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choi Jong-kun said officials in Seoul were aware of the report but had nothing to add.
"During this pandemic era we have publicly expressed our willingness to help, ranging from PCR tests to whatever you can imagine," he told reporters.
Isolated and largely impoverished, North Korea has told the World Health Organization that it hasn't found a single case despite having tested more than 30,000 people. Experts disagree on how credible this is.
"It is a closed-off nation, so we can’t say emphatically that they have cases, but we're fairly certain they do," U.S. Army Gen. Robert Abrams told reporters at the Pentagon last year.
North Korea imposed drastic restrictions on foreign trade, travel and internal movement that would not be open to other nonauthoritarian states. South Korea's spy agency said Kim's regime even had two people executed as part of its frantic bid to keep out the virus.
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"The 'crisis' Kim mentioned might just be a minor violation of quarantine measures," said Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul and the director of NK News, which covers North Korea. "Or maybe they have had a really large outbreak, they are afraid they won't be able to bring it under control and this is Kim's way of warning his own population."
Other North Korea watchers believe this may have been a message to the outside world.
Whether it has suffered outbreaks or not, the pandemic has hit North Korea's economy, coming as a triple-whammy alongside major flooding and international sanctions.
This month, during an appearance at the plenary meeting of the Workers' Party's Central Committee, Kim warned that North Korea's food situation "is now getting tense." Kim's own health has been the subject of international speculation after he appeared in recent photographs to have lost weight, and one North Korean was quoted by KCNA saying they were worried that he looked "emaciated."
Some experts believe Kim's statement on the pandemic this week may be laying the groundwork to request additional assistance from China, Pyongyang's uneasy ally. Or it might be telegraphing its need for Covid-19 vaccine donations.
North Korea was originally in line to receive nearly 2 million vaccines from COVAX, a global charitable shot-sharing program co-run by the WHO.
This was later downgraded to 1.7 million doses to be delivered in May. But supply problems that have plagued the COVAX project mean that — as with many other poorer nations across the world — these are yet to be delivered.
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Putin: U.S. and Britain both behind Black Sea 'provocation' - POLITICO
MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was operating in sync with a British destroyer last week when the ship sailed through the Black Sea in what he described as a “provocation" to test Moscow's response.
Moscow said one of its warships fired warning shots and a warplane dropped bombs in the path of Britain's Defender on June 23 to force it from an area near Crimea that Moscow claims as its territorial waters. Britain insisted its ship wasn’t fired upon and said it was sailing in Ukrainian waters.
The episode was the latest to raise tensions between Russia and the West since Russia's annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a move not recognized by most countries but one that gives it access to a long Black Sea coast.
The U.S. Defense Department had no immediate comment Wednesday on Putin's claim that one of its aircraft was with the British ship last week.
Asked if the events could have triggered World War III, Putin responded that the West wouldn't risk a full-scale conflict.
“Even if we sank that ship, it wouldn’t put the world on the brink of World War III because those who do it know that they can’t emerge as winners in that war, and it’s very important,” Putin said during his annual live call-in show when Russians ask him questions.
Russian officials have warned that if a Western warship enters the waters again, the military could fire to hit. Since it annexed Crimea, Russia has chafed at NATO warships visiting the area as destabilizing.
Britain has insisted the Defender was making a routine journey through an internationally recognized travel lane and remained in Ukrainian waters. The U.K., like most of the world, recognizes Crimea as part of Ukraine despite the peninsula’s annexation by Russia.
Putin charged that the U.S. aircraft’s apparent mission was to monitor the Russian military’s response to the British destroyer.
“It was clearly a provocation, a complex one involving not only the British but also the Americans,” he said, adding that Moscow was aware of the U.S. intentions and responded accordingly to avoid revealing sensitive data.
The Russian leader lamented that the move closely followed his summit with U.S. President Joe Biden in Geneva earlier this month. “Why would they make such provocations?” he said.
Putin insisted that Russia would firmly defend its territory.
“We are fighting for ourselves and our future on our own territory,” he said. “It's not us who traveled thousands of kilometers (miles) to come to them, it's them who have come to our borders and violated our territorial waters.”
Putin emphasized that Moscow is concerned about NATO troops coming to Ukraine for training, reaffirming that a permanent Western military presence on the Ukrainian territory would challenge Russia's vital interests and represent a red line.
He also reiterated, as he often does, that there is a close kinship between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, but accused the Ukrainian leadership of being hostile towards Russia. Putin expressed doubt about the value of a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, describing him as a Western pawn.
“Why meet Zelenskyy if he has put his country under full foreign control and key issues for Ukraine are decided not in Kyiv but in Washington, and, to a certain extent, Paris and Berlin?” Putin asked.
Earlier this year, Russia beefed up its forces near Ukraine and warned Kyiv that it could intervene if they tried to use force to reclaim the areas in the east controlled by Russia-backed separatists since conflict there erupted in 2014. Moscow later pulled back some of its troops, but the Ukrainian authorities said that the bulk of them have remained close to the border.
The Russian president spent most of the four-hour marathon call-in show speaking about domestic issues — as is typical for the tightly choreographed annual rite that helps Putin polish the image of a strong leader caring for people's needs. It didn't feature any questions about Russia's beleaguered opposition and the most prominent of Putin's political foes, Alexei Navalny, who is in prison.
He voiced hope that the country could avoid a nationwide lockdown amid a surge of new infections. Coronavirus deaths in Russia hit a new daily record Wednesday, with the authorities reporting 669, but Putin argued that decisions by local authorities in a number of regions who made vaccination mandatory for some workers should help contain the new wave.
Russia has been registering over 20,000 new coronavirus cases and around 600 deaths every day since last Thursday.
Russian officials have blamed the surge, which started in early June, on Russians’ lax attitude toward taking necessary precautions, the growing prevalence of more infectious variants and low vaccine uptake, which experts attribute to widespread vaccine hesitancy and limited production capacity. Although Russia was among the first countries to announce and deploy a coronavirus vaccine, just over 15% of the population has received at least one shot.
Amid this hesitancy, Putin revealed that he chose the domestically developed Sputnik V for his vaccination. Putin got his first coronavirus shot in late March out of the public eye and has remained tight-lipped about which vaccine out of three developed in Russia that were available at the time he chose.
Amid the surge, about 20 Russian regions — from Moscow and St. Petersburg to the remote far-eastern region of Sakhalin — have made vaccinations mandatory this month for employees in certain sectors.
Turning to other issues, Putin said the Russian authorities have no intention of banning Western social media platforms but emphasized that the government merely wants them to abide by Russian laws, promptly remove inappropriate content and open offices in Russia.
Earlier this year, officials levied heavy fines on social platforms over their alleged failure to remove banned content such as child pornography, information about drugs and calls for protests as they sought to pressure them to heed the demands.
“We tell them: ‘You’re spreading child pornography, or instructions on (how to commit) suicide, or how to create Molotov cocktails. ... You must take it down,’ and they simply don’t listen, don’t want to listen to what we tell them,” Putin said. “But this is wrong."
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The Trail Blazers, Chauncey Billups, Neil Olshey and the big ask: Trust us - The Athletic
One of these days, the conversation around the Trail Blazers will return to the basketball court. But not today. And likely, not in the coming months.
When a shitstorm hits, it takes time for the clouds and the stench to pass.
It’s not that the product in Portland is all that bad. Four starters return from a playoff team. There’s a couple of promising youngsters. And a new coach, with a decorated résumé from his days as a player, has just been hired to theoretically improve the defensive effort.
All that pedigree and promise can not, however, provide refuge from the chaos surrounding the team.
The star player is uneasy, all those playoff exits having taken a toll on Damian Lillard. A coaching search, done amid the noise of a guilty-until-proven-innocent mob, took the shine off what could very well be a stellar hire in Chauncey Billups. It didn’t help that the franchise tried to be transparent Tuesday in Billups’ introductory press conference … until the Blazers weren’t. And it didn’t help that Billups was comfortable humanizing himself … until he — or the team spokesperson who prevented him from answering a question — wasn’t.
I’m going to forgive the spokesperson for a bush league move. It was her first press conference with the franchise. And who knows what kind of orders she was under from higher-ups.
But that’s the thing. It feels like this franchise is asking us for a lot of forgiveness these days.
Forgive them for not putting more talent around the greatest player, and person, in franchise history.
Forgive them for testing our morals and where we stand with sexual allegations, unproven as they may be.
Forgive them for leaking the coaching hire on a Friday and letting their customers — not to mention their star player — wrestle until Tuesday with their conscience, their questions, their loyalty.
Forgive them for keeping chair Jody Allen from making any public comments since inheriting the franchise in October 2018, which seems even more pertinent today in light of the sexual allegations from her past.
Forgive them for firing the popular television broadcast tandem of Mike Barrett and Mike Rice.
So I guess the question today is how much are you willing to forgive? In the coming days, and the coming months, each fan, each observer, each player, will have to decide what matters to them.
If you believe in second chances, and you believe in learning from mistakes, and if you believe in growth, then I imagine come November, Billups in these parts will be more embraced than embattled.
He has some intriguing traits. By all accounts, Billups is a leader. And judging from stories from his playing days, he is a motivator. Those two traits happen to be among his predecessor’s biggest weaknesses. Also, Billups won an NBA title in 2004 playing the same position as Lillard and CJ McCollum, the Blazers’ two highest-paid players. Billups says he has “a really good relationship” with Lillard that “goes some years back.” And McCollum told The Athletic that he’s known Billups from working alongside him during cameos at ESPN and already the two have struck up a conversation.
“We’ve talked about a lot of stuff, and will continue to,” McCollum said. “From hoop strategy, defending, playoffs, to (Clippers’ coach) Tyronn Lue’s ability to adjust and scheme …”
It should also be noted that during Billups’ storied playing career he won three of the NBA’s major honors for character — the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award, the NBA Sportsmanship Award and the Twyman-Stokes Teammate of the Year Award.
That character appears to be forged, at least in part, from the fallout of the November 1997 night that led to the sexual assault allegations and his later settling out of court.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about how every decision that we make can have a profound impact on a person’s life,” Billups said. “I learned at a very young age as a player — not only as a player, but as a young man, a young adult – that every decision has consequences.”
He was 21 at the time, and he said the experience of that night shaped him in his decision-making, such as who he allows in his life, and “in some unbelievable ways,” all of which he was not allowed to elaborate on by the over-protective franchise spokesperson.
As for the allegations themselves? Neil Olshey, the Blazers’ top executive, said the team had its own “thorough process, because some things are just bigger than basketball.”
A source says the team commissioned a former FBI investigator to retrace the case. Witnesses were re-interviewed. Tapes of past interviews were watched. Billups, in his interviews with the team, was questioned about the particulars. Olshey, however, told the press conference — which was being broadcast live by a Portland television station — that the details of who did the investigation and what they found was “proprietary” information. “You are just going to have to take us at our word that we hired an experienced firm who ran an investigation that gave us the results that we’ve already discussed.”
In the end, Olshey said the findings showed “that nothing non-consensual happened and nothing would disqualify him from employment.”
How you take, and process, all that information will be a personal decision. Olshey is asking us to trust him, and to a degree, he has earned that ask. In his nine seasons, he has brought in players of high character, almost to a man. It matters to him.
Never in his tenure, though, has there been a bigger ask, and more need for forgiveness, than this hire and how it was handled. His inability to get out front of the allegations and how the team was addressing them created unrest for Billups, for Lillard, and the fanbase. The hire may ultimately pan out, but there is no escaping that the hiring process was clumsy.
Forgiveness likely won’t come so easily from the fanbase, or from Lillard, if the roster continues to only be tinkered with around the margins. It is becoming more apparent that Lillard wants real, significant change to allow him to compete on the biggest stage. Lord knows he has earned that with his play and his conduct, which has created a bond with this fanbase like no other in team history.
After the press conference on Tuesday, there was a meeting of the minds. Allen, Blazers’ director Bert Kolde, Billups, Olshey and his staff. The hope was that Lillard would make it, too, but he had a busy schedule Tuesday. It was viewed as a last chance to get on the same page before Lillard becomes consumed with Team USA and heads to Tokyo for next month’s Olympics.
Whether Lillard made the meeting or not is moot because Olshey already knows where he stands. On June 19, Lillard met with Olshey for three hours at the team’s practice facility. Listening to Olshey answer a question Tuesday about keeping Lillard happy, it sounds like Lillard made it clear to him that he expected Olshey to show some urgency in his offseason moves.
“Dame and I talk all the time,” Olshey said Tuesday. “And Dame’s happiness revolves around winning, and having a chance to win at the highest level. Chauncey is going to inherit that now, but the ultimate responsibility for that falls on me and my staff to put a team together that we can walk into the beginning of the season and think it has a chance to compete for a championship.
“So the shorter answer is it’s on me to make Dame happy,” Olshey said. “And the way to make Dame happy is to put the pieces around him to where he feels like he can win a championship.”
In the meantime, we are left deciding what matters to us. Left wondering what to believe. Who to believe. And whether the best thing to happen to Portland will one day tire of forgiving the ways of this franchise.
Some day, it will pass. We will return to talking basketball, and how Billups wants to empower Jusuf Nurkic with more offense, and how he wants to bring experienced assistants to his bench to help him turn around one of the league’s worst defenses. And, lord willing, how Lillard intends to finish his career in Portland.
To do that, we would have to forgive. Again.
(Photo: Sam Forencich/NBAE via Getty Images)
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START FREE TRIALOne of these days, the conversation around the Trail Blazers will return to the basketball court. But not today. And likely, not in the coming months.
When a shitstorm hits, it takes time for the clouds and the stench to pass.
It’s not that the product in Portland is all that bad. Four starters return from a playoff team. There’s a couple of promising youngsters. And a new coach, with a decorated résumé from his days as a player, has just been hired to theoretically improve the defensive effort.
All that pedigree and promise can not, however, provide refuge from the chaos surrounding the team.
The star player is uneasy, all those playoff exits having taken a toll on Damian Lillard.
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