With three first-round draft picks and a ton of guaranteed contracts on the books, the Portland Trail Blazers are bound to look different next season. Anything they do, given their cap situation, must be executed via trade.
But the Blazers are also unique in that they are an unfinished product with two cornerstones, Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum. Both play in the backcourt, and both can be defensive liabilities, so there’s always been this thought that the Blazers could move one as a way of acquiring another star who fills a hole outside the backcourt.
At his end-of-the-year presser, though, general manager Neil Olshey made it clear that isn’t happening, per The Oregonian‘s Mike Richman:
Q: Are Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum off limits or are they like everyone else and open to being dealt?
A: The odds of anything ever coming up of commensurate value is so hard to even fathom. I could give you the trite answer that nobody is untradable, but clearly they are.
Trading one of them is an issue Olshey probably visits the offseason after this one, if the Blazers have failed to meet expectations. Right now, they still have the unknown on their side.
The Jusuf Nurkic trade turned their season around. Portland saw enough during his 20-game sample, before he suffered a fracture in his leg, to justify wanting to see even more. At full strength, within the Western Conference’s current landscape, he doesn’t make the Blazers a top-four team, but their performance on both ends of the floor was significantly better after acquiring him, according to NBA.com. He alone, when paired with McCollum and Lillard, could turn the Blazers into a playoff formality, rather than a fringe lottery team.
That’s a step in the right direction—a bright enough outlook for Olshey to tweak and tinker without making any wholesale changes to the roster, let alone one of the most feared backcourts in basketball.
