Apparently Lamarcus Aldridge tried to come back to Portland multiple times, and Neil Olshey wouldn’t let him….unreal

Apparently Lamarcus Aldridge tried to come back to Portland multiple times, and Neil Olshey wouldn't let him….unreal
byu/Throwawaybob2225 inripcity

29 comments

  1. Olshey not letting him come back when he was still a good player and could have helped us is absolute malpractice… but the fact that he didn’t even let him come back at the very end of his career so he could retire a Blazer? WTF. That would have meant so much to the people who grew up watching him in Portland who were hurt when he left. Olshey is trash.

  4. Are you kidding.. I always wondered why he never came back. I def thought he would retire a blazer even if he was just a bench/vet guy.

    Makes sense now…..:/

  5. Well maybe he shouldn’t have ditched us in the first place then right as dame was starting to ascend. 

    He was one of my absolute favorite players growing up but I don’t feel bad for him at all. I feel bad for us for him leaving after saying he’d retire here. 

  6. I don’t trust Lamarcus. Just like he said he was going to re-sign with us.

  7. He left Portland high and dry. Yes Portland could’ve used him but what he did was unforgivable and even the NO is a dumb mfer I don’t blame him for this one.

  8. I believe it. LaMarcus was not well liked by the team. When Wheels was around (RIP) he used to have informal fan talks, and some of the stuff they said about the eggshells everyone walked on when LA was around was pretty damning. It’s very possible they thought he was too caustic to return regardless of his history and his ability on the court.

  9. Loved Aldridge as a player on our team. Obviously I don’t know all the details. But the fact that he seemed to lead us on the saying that he wanted to be the best Blazer of all time. Everything he was saying made it seem like he wanted to stay long term then he leaves for another team in free agency. Not giving us a chance to get any value by trading him before he left. Selfishly I was glad he didn’t do well in San antonio. I wish he would have stayed with Lillard who knows what could have happened

  10. Why would Olshey give up a haul to get him back when he had just left us for nothing?

  11. I soured on Aldridge because of his unwillingness to play center and defer to Lillard, but he should’ve been allowed to retire here. I feel like the Blazers could sign him for a day to get that done.

  12. As a kid, I asked LMA for an autograph at a season-ticket holder event happen to be there early. No one was around him except for one security guy. I had his rookie card and a sharpie and bro said he won’t sign it and to find him before a game sometime. Bro ended up leaving Portland that off-season. -_-

  15. I hate Olshey but LMA fucked us over first when he left for nothing. But this totally sucks, we could’ve seen prime Dame and a decent big.

  16. Good! He didn’t deserve to come back. Consequences of your own damn actions. There were plenty of reasons the Dame era didn’t go better but the way LA left the team contibuted to it.

  19. Neil is the sleezy car salesman and LMA was the tire kicker. Fans and franchise missed out because of these two guys collectively.

  20. Dude burned a lot of bridges leaving the way that he did, what did he expect?

  21. I get that it’s fuck Neil, and I’m on board, but I can’t really fault him on this one. Lamarcus said he was gonna stay and be the best Blazer ever, only to run off to San Antonio for nothing. I could see why Neil didn’t want to trade for a player that was already supposed to be in the team, the trust was gone.

  22. In hindsight, he ended up having heart issues again so people would have been mad about that instead.

  23. People seem to forget that Aldridge had a terrible attitude about portland as a city and aspects of the fan base and a handful of the players by the time he left. He was a beast but a lot of that info came out once he left. Time buries all I guess.

  24. I am by no means an Olshey defender but the LMA situation was verging on toxic by the end of his blazers tenure. I wouldn’t wanna spend assets to bring that element back to the locker room either

    Edit: not to mention LMA began to decline pretty quickly after leaving

  25. People in this thread are either willfully ignorant or blinded by nostalgia. Beyond the fact that Lamarcus, an aging back to the basket player-with a heart condition that prevented him for playing major minutes down the stretch-would not have pushed the blazers into championship contention, there is the harsh truth that LMA burned the bridge on the way out.

    I don’t understand this subreddit’s warped sense of loyalty, our unwillingness to be frank and see the writing on the wall is what got us in the bind that we are in currently.

  26. IMO, both LMA and Olshey are bad narrators on how all this went down.

    Just cuz he says here he wanted back and Neil said no doesnt mean it was a “fuck you LMA we hate you here” thing, if San Antonio asks for too much for him, then it makes sense to say “no”, especially on a guy that already bolted town AFTER you draft the PG he wants and build the team around him.

    He bailed on the blazers on a season that up until Wes Mathews went down, they were 1 of the bast starting 5 statistically and a strong team. him leaving caused a playoff contending team to collapse and go into a “try to both compete and rebuild” panic spiral. On LMA’s side he quickly found out that just because he was the golden man in PDX and was catered to by the team there, that doesnt mean he’s going to be treated like he’s special in San Antonio, that’s Tim Duncan’s kingdom, your ass is just another Power Forward there, and he quickly found out how expendable and “on the trading block” he was as soon as he wasnt able to perform as well.

    In the end the way it all went down for LMA, its a case of “damn, the grass wasnt greener on the otherside”, and for the blazers, it was a series of lessons on mismanagement, and giving subpar players bloated contracts in a weird panic atempt to keep the blazers in a “just good enough to lose in the 1st round” for too long.

  27. LM screwed the team by leaving for nothing and then wanted the Blazers to give up assets to get him back?

    Olshey is a dipshit but he was 100% right on this.

  28. Yeah you can’t be surprised that the org didn’t want you back you fucking bum.

    You blew up our team because you couldn’t stand another good player coming in and taking the final shot, wanted to be the pretty girl at the party and wanted us to rub Vaseline on your hiney and tell that you were special.

    We lost fucking years of capital because of you you fucking bum. Afflalo, Wes, Rolo, Batum, all of them gone because you wanted to feel special.

    You don’t get to come back now and wax poetic about how you wanted to be in Portland.

    You left.

    YOU. Fucking left us. And your leaving us started a cascade of loss of assets that still haunts us this day.

    You get no sympathy from me. NONE. I will never forgive you.

    You fucking bum.

Leave a Reply