TUALATIN, Ore. \u2014 Micah Nori was told by several NBA teams that he was their No. 2 choice to be head coach before the Portland Trail Blazers finally gave him his chance at No. 1.<\/p>\n
A 28-year journey in the NBA culminated in Nori joining general manager Joe Cronin on Thursday at the Blazers’ practice facility for his introductory news conference.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think for five of the interviews they said, \u2018Micah you are our No. 2,\u2019\u201d Nori said, citing his recent experience interviewing for the New York Knicks in 2025. \u201c\u2018You were phenomenal, but Mike Brown\u2019s done it before. We\u2019ve never seen you in that seat.\u2019 When you slide over, everybody says it\u2019s that 18 inches. Do I get discouraged? Absolutely not. You don\u2019t stay in this thing for 28 years starting where I started (by getting discouraged).\u201d<\/p>\n
Nori, who spent the past five seasons with the Minnesota Timberwolves, had interviewed for multiple head coach vacancies, including the Knicks last year, the Chicago Bulls earlier this month and the Los Angeles Lakers in 2024. He began his NBA career as an intern for the Toronto Raptors in 1998. <\/p>\n
After nearly three decades of coming to Portland with the visiting team, he is eager to be on the other side.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter 28 years of coming out here and seeing all the red, seeing all the noise, it\u2019s just very tough to play (here),\u201d Nori said. \u201cI\u2019m super excited to be a part of it, and I can promise you that every single night \u2014 and I don\u2019t like promises and guarantees \u2014 but we will play hard for 48-plus, we\u2019re going to play smart for 48-plus and we will play together for 48-plus.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nori addressed areas of improvement for the Blazers, including turnovers and 3-point percentage. He noted that next season will see the return of Damian Lillard, who is fourth on the list of the NBA’s all-time 3-point shooters. Lillard sat out last season with an Achilles injury. <\/p>\n
The Blazers made the playoffs this season for the first time in five seasons under interim coach Tiago Splitter, who was hired this month by the Bulls. Splitter coached Portland to a 42-40 record and a five-game loss to San Antonio in the first round of the playoffs.<\/p>\n
Nori emphasized the opportunity he is getting to be a first-time head coach with a team that just made the playoffs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThings happen for a reason, my wife always tells me that,\u201d Nori said. \u201cAnd to sit here and say we have a playoff roster, adding a future Hall of Famer in this great city and this great fanbase, the support that we get. It\u2019s an opportunity that I could not pass up, and I\u2019m ecstatic to take. That\u2019s why I get choked up, because it\u2019s better than what I could have ever imagined.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the 2024 playoffs, Nori stepped into a role as in-game head coach after Minnesota\u2019s Chris Finch suffered a knee injury. That experience showed Nori he was ready to be a head coach.<\/p>\n
\u201cI learned that I could do it. And I can do it at the highest level in a Western Conference playoff Game 7.\u201d Nori said. \u201cNow, I\u2019m not going to lie, thank goodness for Anthony Edwards, Naz Reid and Karl-Anthony Towns. I helped a little bit, but they did 90% of it. But I learned that you can\u2019t micromanage every single thing. You have to get good people around you and trust people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nori also responded to criticism about his contract leveled by Detroit Pistons head coach J.B. Bickerstaff, the National Basketball Coaches Association president, who called the deal “a slap in the face to our value\u201d in an interview with ESPN. The contract has just one guaranteed year and back-to-back team option years. <\/p>\n
Nori, who sits on that board of the organization, said he had a conversation with Bickerstaff and it had no bearing on him.<\/p>\n
Cronin rebuffed suggestions that the terms of the deal hurt Portland\u2019s ability to get its preferred coach, saying the team hired the coach it wanted. <\/p>\n
\u201cTo me, it\u2019s done, it\u2019s finished,\u201d Nori said. \u201cThis is one of these things, you can have 8 million people watching this press conference; you can have 100,000. Next week, nobody\u2019s really going to care about this press conference. What they will care about is what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TUALATIN, Ore. \u2014 Micah Nori was told by several NBA teams that he was their No. 2 choice…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":770949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3784],"tags":[7,601,6,687,471,3967,476,1617,2148],"class_list":["post-770948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-portland-trail-blazers","tag-basketball","tag-blazers","tag-nba","tag-portland","tag-portland-trail-blazers","tag-portlandtrailblazers","tag-toronto-raptors","tag-trail-blazers","tag-wires-bot"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116815701905986525","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/770949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}