MAILBAG: What Will the Trail Blazers Do With Anfernee Simons?

Here are the first two parts of this week's mailbag:

MAILBAG: Has the Trail Blazers’ Timeline Been Accelerated?

Does a trade for Kevin Durant or Zion Williamson make sense?

The Rose Garden ReportSean Highkin

MAILBAG: Who Do the Trail Blazers Most Need to Trade This Offseason?

Plus: Will Jerami Grant come off the bench if he’s still in Portland?

The Rose Garden ReportSean Highkin

They will continue today, tomorrow and Friday.

Rank the following outcomes based on what you think is most likely. Anfernee Simons is:
a. Traded
b. Signs an extension
c. Remains on the Blazers through the year, and becomes a free agent.

— Ross M.

I'd put A and B about even, with C behind them.

I'll have more next week about the various contract decisions the Blazers will have to make up and down the roster, but I don't think either the team or Simons wants to go into the season without any clarity on the future.

I could see a Simons trade happening, especially if they decide to truly go all-in on Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe as their backcourt. But Simons is also one of the current team captains (along with Myles Turner) of the Taj Gibson-Josh Smith-C.J. McCollum team of "very good but non-All-Star players with the most consecutive years being in trade rumors without actually getting traded." So if you told me they extended him at a team-friendly number, I wouldn't think it was the most shocking thing in the world, either.

Do you think there will be any changes to the coaching staff or will they stay pat?

— Jason M.

I wouldn't expect a massive overhaul like there was last summer. When the Blazers decided last offseason to both not fire Chauncey Billups and not pick up his fifth-year option, the way they instead shook things up was by changing out about half of his coaching staff.

Unless you're in the gym every day for practice (which us media members don't actually get to watch), it's hard to know who's responsible for what, but the additions of Nate Bjorkgren and Chris Fleming seem to have been positive. Fleming in particular has gotten a lot of credit for helping Scoot Henderson turn his career around in the same way he helped Coby White's early development when he was in Chicago.

Unless one of their assistants leaves for a different job (always possible), I don't think they're going to make big changes.

One thing to keep an eye on, that could lead to some movement, is the head coaching opening with the Rip City Remix. Assistant GM Sergi Oliva served as the Blazers' G League head coach this season, but that was just a one-year assignment and Oliva is expected to return to the front office moving forward.

So the Blazers will need to find a new coach for the Remix. It's possible they go outside the organization for that hire, but it's also possible they give the job to one of Billups' assistants, if one of them wants to do it to get some reps as a head coach. (If they went that way, I think the logical choice would be Jonah Herscu, who has coached the Blazers' Summer League team the last two seasons and also served as a guest coach at the NBA's predraft combine.)

If they fill the Remix job internally, that will create an opening on the Blazers' staff that I'd expect they'd backfill. But I don't think they're actively looking to change up the staff in a major way. They're happy with the changes they made last year.

I know you are big on the human interest side of things. What was the exit like for Taze Moore? When he was let go from the two-way deal did he lose his G League spot as well in a double whammy? On that note, has the G League team's supposed experimental nature yielded anything productive?

— Knútur

I wish I had a better answer for you on how Moore reacted to getting waived, but he wasn't with the Blazers at the time. They cut him to free up a two-way spot for Sidy Cissoko while the team was on a road trip in Minneapolis just before the All-Star break, and Moore was with the Remix. Cissoko didn't join the Blazers right away—he flew to Portland to play a game for the Remix before meeting the team in Denver for their last game before the break.

To answer your second question, when the Blazers waived Moore from his two-way contract, he also lost his spot on the Remix. I suppose the Blazers could have signed him to a G League contract after waiving him if they wanted to, but they didn't. It's too bad—Moore's a good guy who I enjoyed getting to know. But that's life on the fringes of the NBA sometimes.

From what I gathered, the Blazers were happy with the way the Remix's season went overall, when it came to some of the experimentation they wanted to do with practice methods. They definitely stuck to a lot of the pace-and-space stuff they wanted to do—they played at the fastest pace of any team in the G League and had the second-highest percentage of their shots come from three-point range.

I'll be interested to see what they do next year with a different coach.