Joe Cronin's Summer of Hard Choices
The Trail Blazers didn't get an extended look at their young core due to injuries. They have to make some decisions anyway.
📍 TUALATIN, Ore. — The surest sign that Joe Cronin is growing into the big job is that he’s learned not to say anything.
If you’re looking through the Trail Blazers’ general manager’s Monday end-of-season media availability for clues about what might happen this offseason—where he’s leaning in the draft, which veterans are on the trade block, how many games he wants to win next season—you’re not going to find much. The only news Cronin made was confirming that Chauncey Billups, as expected, would be back as head coach next season.
Monday’s low-key press conference was a complete 180 from the one Cronin gave a year ago, when he made big promises about pushing in all his chips to build a contender around Damian Lillard. Promises he couldn’t keep, either because he didn’t want to or because making them so publicly submarined his leverage in trade talks ahead of last year’s draft.
Back then, Cronin telegraphed a sense of urgency to make big moves and get better immediately. This time around, going into the first full offseason of his post-Lillard rebuild, he projected a willingness to be patient, let Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe continue to develop and wait for the right deal to come along.
He wouldn’t let it on, but there is still urgency for him to get some things done this summer. It’s a different kind of urgency than pull off a huge move or your franchise’s all-time leading scorer will request a trade, but Cronin knows he needs to figure things out this summer.
“We're not good enough yet, we don't have enough talent,” Cronin said Monday. “The most important thing this summer is to keep adding to our talent base.”
Because of injuries, the Blazers’ five most important players—Henderson, Sharpe, Anfernee Simons, Jerami Grant and Deandre Ayton—only appeared in four games together this season and some of them were already hurt by the time some of the rebuild’s other promising young players, like Kris Murray, Rayan Rupert and Duop Reath, started to emerge.
Cronin and his staff don’t have a lot of information on how this group looks playing together to go on in deciding how to improve a roster that’s about to get expensive and is still a ways off from even play-in contention. But that limited sample size is going to have to be enough to make some tough choices this summer.
Cronin knows that, too.