As you may be aware if you’ve been keeping up on Trail Blazers news, General Manager Neil Olshey joined Grantland’s Zache Lowe in The Lowe Post podcast earlier this week. The entire podcast is worth a listen, but it is also over an hour long. In case you do not have the time or patience to go through the whole thing, I have isolated one section about the Trail Blazers’ game plan that is particularly interesting. Olshey and Lowe discuss, in-depth, the contract of Al-Farouq Aminu, as well as how they see the next great Trail Blazers team forming. Here is the transcript:
"Lowe: I feel like there’s an annual tradition of laughing at the first contract that gets agreed to in free agency. It’s like the Jodie Meeks rule. We should call the first day of free agency the Jodie Meeks day or something. This year it was Al-Farouq Aminu, four years, $30 million or $32M, I don’t have the exact figure off the top of my head, and everyone just laughed. Without leading you anywhere, why is that a good contract? Why should they not be laughing at that contract?Olshey: If they’re laughing at him, they haven’t seen him play, and they haven’t realized that in two years that cap is going to be $108 million. So you’re basically talking about a deal that will be less than what the mid-level was on the previous cap. This is a guy that I know well. I drafted him. I had him for a year with the Clippers. He’s tracking up. I think his growth was accelerated by playing for Rick Carlisle in Dallas. I think that was like a three year tutorial crammed into nine months. He’s a better player today than he was then.Look, we had moved Nic Batum. We wanted to get younger at that position and we wanted to get an athletic guy so that when we chose to push the floor we felt like at that point he could play in multiple roles with LaMarcus [Aldridge] or without, depending on what his decision was. I really believe that when you look at the way the contract is structured, we had a lot of cap room this year—it’s a descending deal…Lowe: Yeah, how did you get these guys? You got Ed Davis on the same thing. I’m looking at it now. Al-Farouq will make $8M-flat next season and three years from now he’ll make $6.9M. Ed Davis also declines. I mean, is that a hard sell, or is it not a hard sell because players get more money immediately? Does it not matter because it’s all guaranteed? It’s becoming more common, but in these cases you obviously pushed hard for that because once the cap reaches $108M it might fall. It’s currently projected to fall, so there’s some benefit there. Did they care?Olshey: I think you have a couple of guys right there that were coming off small deals. Both guys were playing at a minimum basically. So the present day value of the money, the impact it has on their life right away, it doesn’t descend by that much but I think philosophically for us, like I said, our goal was to get good young players on favorable deals. By doing them longer term, we were trying to mitigate the cap impact of those contracts down the road to continue.We knew we were going to have to max out Damian Lillard, and that’s an ascending deal, so we were trying to mitigate it and balance our books. It gave them more money up front in the first two years, so for guys that hadn’t really had that big hit the way others had, it gave us more flexibility down the road. The irony is when you look around at the contracts that were signed later, I think Farouq is a great value.We’re talking about a guy we’re projecting as a starter. We were paying our previous small forward almost $13 million. So to get Farouq for $8M, we think it’s a really good deal for us. We think he’s a great fit with—because his best days in Dallas were when he was surrounded by shooters—well, Damian Lillard is a shooter, McCollum is a shooter, Meyers Leonard is a shooter. We’ve got three guys surrounding him that can really shoot the ball, which frees Farouq up to do the things that he’s excellent at, which is being an impact defender, playing multiple positions, he’s a great offensive rebounder, he can fill the wing.As Terry [Stotts] did for Nic Batum, you know, Terry is a great empowerer—if that’s even a word. He expanded Nic’s game, not so much in terms of skill set because they were there, but by empowering Nic to do more things with the basketball, take on more playmaking responsibilities.Like I said, Farouq will have more value to us than he probably did in his previous stops just because of the way he’ll be utilized in Terry’s system and the guys he’s surrounded with. I believe in this because I watched it happen with Robin Lopez. One of the things that is lost in a lot of this Zach, and we take great pride in—and look, Nic got traded—but every other guy, for the most part, that we let go, that we didn’t pursue, got gargantuan raises this year. So we must have been doing something right.Lowe: Including the dude who tore his Achilles. I mean, I love Wes, but that contract, even Cuban has said to me on this podcast that that could be the next Tracy McGrady, Grant Hill contract. I hope it’s not, because Wes is a badass and a great guy, but that’s an enormous risk.Olshey: It is, but you know what, Wes is a special guy and a special worker and there’s no doubt he’s been doing everything he needs to do and will continue to do, but like I said, Wes got a huge raise, Robin got a raise, Joel went to Europe and he got a raise. What we were doing here was working, we really just felt like we were a collective, a lot of it played off of LaMarcus in practice and in philosophy, and when he wasn’t going to be here, we immediately redirected our resources and shifted and went in another direction.Lowe: I mildly defended the Farouq deal after it happened because a lot of fans, because they’re not interested in the nitty-gritty and they shouldn’t be, they have lives and they can’t get into the salary cap, they just haven’t started to conceptualize how the numbers are going to change and that $8 million three seasons from now or two seasons from now is like $4 million or $5 million now, as a bench player basically.And he is a multi-positional player and everyone wants these guys that can slide between the 2, 3, and the 4 defensively, and he can do that. I just think he’s got to get a little better at either shooting or dribbling to get that really sort of Swiss army knife game too. And it doesn’t have to be ‘Nic Batum’ ball handler or a 40 percent 3-point shooter, but he’s got to become more capable at one of those two things, and then you’ve really got something.Olshey: Well, we’ll see. And like I said, a lot of it is the belief we have in our player development staff. When you look at the growth of some of the guys, these were the kinds of conversations we were having about Meyers Leonard six months ago until he finished as a 50-40-90 guy and put on a performance in the playoffs against the best center on the planet right now in Marc Gasol.You’re always going to have to project and play the future game when you are in the situation we’re in. If Farouq handled the ball like Nic Batum and shot 40 percent from three, he’d be on a max contract and Dallas never would have let him walk away. Clearly, that’s what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to embrace what guys do do, Zach, pay them accordingly, and then develop the other areas of their game.I was talking with somebody about this earlier and I talked to our fans who are season ticket holders. I went through this model when I took over the Clippers. I kind of threw Vinny Del Negro to the wolves by surrounding him with a bunch of… we were like the ‘kiddy core’. We started Eric Bledsoe and Eric Gordon and Al-Farouq Aminu and Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan. That all sounds like that’d be a great team right now—it might be a team that would compete to go to the finals, but back then, other than Blake Griffin, none of those guys were household names.So if you reverse engineer it and you look and you say, ‘well of course you did it with those guys,’ well, we believe that Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum and Al-Farouq Aminu and Meyers Leonard and Mason Plumlee and that group of guys can do what that group did. It may not be Day 1, but when it happens it’s going to be sustainable and it’s going to be a bunch of guys on the same career arc and, to your point, because of the collective bargaining agreement and hopefully being able to retain players because of their free agent status, it’s a group we can keep together."
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