Rip City had questions — and Trail Blazers GM Neil Olshey even answered a few

Portland Trail Blazers President of Basketball Operations Neil Olshey answered reporters’ questions Sunday during the team’s annual end-of-season interviews. Here are three things that caught our ear.

The shock was still apparent at the team’s practice facility in Tualatin during the team’s annual parade of “exit interviews.” It was just one day after the New Orleans Pelicans had bounced the third-seeded Blazers out of the first round of the playoffs in a four-game sweep that has much of Rip City continuing to shake its collective head in disbelief.

Portland fans are having an ongoing debate over who should bear the brunt of criticism for the team’s poor performance in the playoffs. We’ve had this debate before at the RCP, and the consensus seems to be that it’s Olshey’s general management of the team that’s put us where we are right now. A vocal — and to my mind, irrational — subset of Blazers fans blames head coach Terry Stotts. (We pooh-poohed that idea here.)

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But regardless of who’s to blame — be it Olshey or Stotts or owner Paul Allen or the players themselves — for this predicament, Olshey faced a group of reporters Sunday and answered some questions. (Thanks to The Oregonian / OregonLive for posting a transcript.)

Here are three of the highlights (lowlights?).

Sweep ‘Doesn’t Change Anything’

Asked if the first-round sweep changed his thinking about the team’s season, Olshey said, “It doesn’t change anything about the season.”

Olshey defended his approach, suggesting that he will not “lose sight of the success we had throughout the course of the season, and the growth that we had.”

Winning 49 games with limited talent can definitely be considered a success. But what Blazers fans want to see is “growth” that gives the team a chance to advance beyond the first round — something Portland fails to do 67.6 percent of the time it makes the playoffs.

‘Bifurcate’? ‘Blend It In’?

Olshey backtracked a bit when asked directly if he considered the season a success. But he stuck to the idea that we should “bifurcate” the season into distinct parts (regular season, playoffs) in order to judge the season appropriately.

“I don’t even know that the postseason, honestly, was long enough to blend it in with the other 82 games,” Olshey said.

But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? The postseason wasn’t long enough — and that’s because Olshey hasn’t assembled a team talented enough to make it very far in the playoffs.

‘I Don’t Have All The Answers For You Today’

When asked how the Blazers might “take that next step” in the ultracompetitive Western Conference, Olshey said he didn’t have all the answers. But then he turned to a strawman argument.

“Everybody wants to know that there’s some magical free agent,” Olshey said. “There’s some incredible trade.”

No, sir. Not everybody. And it has nothing to do with magic.

For example, how might the Blazers have looked in the first round of the playoffs if they — and not the Pelicans — had Nikola Mirotic. Olshey certainly knows that Mirotic torched the Blazers for 30 points on 12/15 shooting in Game 3. And in the four-game sweep, Mirotic averaged 18.3 points (on 57 percent shooting), 9.5 rebounds, 2.5 blocks and 1.8 steals.

It doesn’t take “magic” to have scouted Mirotic when he was available — or to know that he might have been a valuable asset for the Blazers in the playoffs. Lots of people in and around Rip City thought trading for him would be a good idea. Why didn’t Olshey? Mirotic certainly helped the Pelicans turn their season around when he was traded from Chicago not long after DeMarcus Cousins was lost to injury.

Blazers, Olshey and Rip City

Like the Blazers’ “bifurcated” season, Olshey has his strengths and his weaknesses. If this team gels next season — for the whole season — the way it did during that fabulous 13-game winning streak, and if it is able to carry that momentum far into the 2019 playoffs, well, then Olshey will have proved us all wrong.

That’s the glass-half-full version. And we admit to being enticed by that version of the Blazers story.

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There was certainly a lot of glass-half-full-ism from Olshey during his exit interview. And a lot more of his responses to digest than the little bits we’ve covered here. For example, much of Rip City is buzzing over some of the other things that Olshey said, especially his “where were all these people?” comment.

Well, Neil Olshey, we were here the whole time — criticizing the team when we felt it was justified and calling out nonsense whenever and wherever we saw it.

And we’ll continue to do that for our readership.

You want to build a winner. We want to cover a winner.

So build a winner. And stop covering your behind.