Portland Trail Blazers to actively seek trade to improve roster

Portland Trail Blazers President of Basketball Operations Neil Olshey spoke with the media on Thursday about the direction that the Trail Blazers organization has taken in free agency. With about $25M left to spend after acquiring several young and talented players, everyone is eager to know where the team will go from here. The answer is the trade block. Remaining free agents of noteworthy talent are few and far between, so the Trail Blazers hope to use their cap room to their advantage in fair exchange.

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"Neil, obviously you have so much cap space left to make moves and you have roster spots available, are you going to just sit on most of that cap space, or how will you move forward here?Cap room is a tool. One of the things that I talked to our internal staff yesterday about is, you’ve got to understand, you’ve got the draft, you’ve got free agency, you’ve got trades. Our first year we had some cap room, we took a shot in the free agent market, it didn’t work out. The next year, it wasn’t a great free agent market, the guys that were open to coming… you know. But, we made really good trades.Everyone forgets, that’s how Robin Lopez got here was the fact that we had the cap room to do an uneven deal. We jumped in there, we signed other guys. It’s how we had the room and level to go get Mo Williams, who made a major impact.So there are a lot of ways to use cap room beyond just the free agent process. It’s July 9, we’re only nine days into the off-season. We’ve got months now where we are going to be one of the major players with cap room, and it’s not about buying power in free agency, but how you can construct deals going forward. Whether it’s 1-to-1 or whether it’s 3-team deals, but our cap room is a factor.[…]Is it likely that you do a trade before the season starts?I hope so. But remember, that cap room is good all the way through to the end of the year. So we’ve got the trade deadline, we’ve got the rest of the summer, we all go to Summer League in a couple of days. I’ve done deals before where I’ve been the last man standing. We needed a power forward desperately when Elton [Brand] left [the Los Angeles Clippers] and we were the last team with cap room, and we did a deal to acquire Marcus Camby years ago – and it happened at Summer League.This is the first wave. Everybody was worried about free agency and now teams will kind of sit down, look at what they have, where they need to improve, where they are in what they’re trying to accomplish, and then who can facilitate their needs. So we’ll remain active on that front."

Video via Portland Trail Blazers

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