John Nash Blazers scapegoat

After Bob Whitsitt, the Blazers hired John Nash as their General Manager before the 2003-04 season. He was brought in to start the "clean-up" process. Fan support was starting to dwindle as they were embarrassed by the actions of the players off the court. Character does matter in Portland as we don't want our fine city's reputation ruined across the nation by our only professional sports team. Bob Whitsitt must have flunked chemistry as he could never figure that out and only looked at players talent on the court.

It was Nash's job to unload the baggage on the team. On paper some of his trades may have looked bad, but they were good character moves. The NBA considered his trade of Bonzi Wells on December 3, 2003 to the Memphis Grizzlies for guard Wesley Person, a conditional first round pick in 2004 and cash, as a bad trade. Wells was an up-and-coming star in the NBA, but he had wore out his welcome in Portland with his off-the-court drug antics. This was a welcome trade to Blazer fans. Person was a good character veteran, and the team needed some veteran talent to go with all their young players.

On January 21, 2004 he did make a controversial move by trading two good character players in guard Jeff McInnis and center Ruben Boumtje Boumtje to the Cleveland Cavaliers for forward Darius Miles. At the time it looked like a good move as the Blazers were able to get a high scoring forward in Miles, who looked like a future all-star for next to nothing, but he had wore out his welcome in Cleveland and the Cavs were trying to unload him and his big salary. He had some character flaws too, which Portland always brings out the worse in people. He took #23 in Portland, and Blazer fans tried to imagine him as the other famous #23 Michael Jordan we passed up in the draft.

Nash's best trade was getting Rasheed Wallace out of town trading him and guard Wesley Person to the Atlanta Hawks on February 9, 2004 for guard Dan Dickau (bringing him back to the Northwest his family lives in Vancouver, Washington), forward Shareef Abdur-Rahim, and center Theo Ratliff. The Hawks later traded Rasheed Wallace to the Detroit Pistons and he got the last laugh on Portland winning a championship in Detroit.

In the 2004 NBA draft Nash made a pretty good move selecting high school phenom guard Sebastian Telfair with the 13th pick overall in the first round. He would become the Blazers future point-guard as they did not re-sign Damon Stoudamire as a free agent and let the Memphis Grizzlies sign him in 2005.

Nash was given the difficult task of bringing Blazer spending in order. Paul Allen was no longer handing out blank checks to try and buy a championship. The closest he came to that was in the 2000 season, which I already commented on in the previous post. Nash had to bring the Blazers salary down by bringing in young players and trading or cutting the expensive veterans. I won't get into all the moves he made as I'm sure they are documented on Blazers.com. The Blazers went from a-then-NBA record of $105 million in salaries in 2003, to just $60 million last season.

I have to give Nash credit for getting the tough job done. The bottom line doesn't look like he did a very good job as general manager as the Blazers missed the playoffs in all three season he was GM of the Blazers, but by the Blazers getting progressively worse (41-41 in 2003, 27-55 in 2004, and the NBA's worst team at 21-61 this past season) also raised their draft picks and the Blazers were able to build for the future.

This probably was John Nash's last General Manager job in the NBA. The Blazers haven't signed a new one yet. They went into the 2006 NBA draft without a GM. Who will the next one be? The Cleveland Cavaliers let Jim Paxson go, it would be nice if he could come back to Portland's front office as a former player. Kiki Vandeweghe, also a former Blazer, could return to Portland as their next GM. We'll just have to wait and see.