The Portland Trail Blazers really, really wanted Yang Hansen. In fact, they wanted him so badly that they apparently contacted him in December 2023, nearly two years before they stunningly selected him in the first round of the 2025 NBA Draft.
Unfortunately, that's not actually allowed. Hansen wasn't a draft-eligible player in 2023 making this against league rules, and the Blazers just got docked $100,000 for it, along with indefinite suspensions for assistant GMs Mike Schmitz and Sergi Olva, according to a report from ESPN.
That's not good. Schmitz, who used to run DraftExpress (one of the preeminent NBA Draft scouting sites in the world, which was eventually bought by ESPN), has a pretty big hand in the draft process for the Trail Blazers. Not having him around for the pre-draft process is a pretty big hit (although if the Blazers make the playoffs, they will notably enter the draft with no picks).
He does a lot of his work behind the scenes, but you can definitely tell when a pick has Schmitz's fingerprints all over it; think back to the Shaedon Sharpe pick in 2022. It was the team's first selection with Schmitz on board — and in the months leading up to the draft, while Schmitz was still working at ESPN, he kept telling everyone how great Shaedon Sharpe was... And then drafted him after being hired by the Blazers. He was right about Sharpe being awesome by the way, and that pick was a great first impression. He doesn't have a 100% hit rate, but no front office does.
It's hard to be mad at Schmitz for contacting a player they actually did eventually draft. The guy loves his job so much he (presumably) told the rest of the front office about a player no one else had ever heard of halfway across the world. In an NBA where players get minimal punishments for abhorrent actions, this feels extraordinarily harsh from Adam Silver.
Blazers get harsh penalty for contacting Yang Hansen
I already really wanted Yang Hansen to be a good NBA player because it would simply be really cool — but now it feels like there's even more pressure on the Blazers to get that pick right, as they were clearly intrigued by his game when he was a teenager and took the risk of penalty to contact him (if they even know they were breaking the rules, that is).
Not having Schmitz in the building less than three months before the NBA Draft is a pretty big hit. I trust Joe Cronin to hold things down, but Schmitz has been a huge part of this front office's success in team building and clearly has Cronin's ear on player evaluation.
At this point, the Blazers might as well make the playoffs and give their first-round pick to Chicago so they don't have to worry about high-pressure picks. In the meantime, the Blazers' decision-makers are involved in yet another story that feels unique in NBA history. Cool?