Pritchard Talks Blazers:  Former Blazer General Manager Kevin Pritchard joined 95.5 the Game with John Canzano and talked about a wide range of subjects including some hindsight on the Blazers’ decision to draft Greg Oden with the top overall pick in the 2007 NBA Draft over Kevin Durant.

“I have never studied a person or players like I did Durant/Oden,” explained Pritchard. “It was every single minute of every single second of their entire careers. We were going back into AAU.

“The one thing that kept hitting us really hard was Greg Oden lost three games until he got to Ohio State, then he got hurt again and only lost a couple there and that was over hundreds and hundreds of games. The overwhelming thing that we got from everybody we talked to was the cat doesn’t care if he scores or does anything, but he’s about winning.”

The decision to draft Oden over Durant at the time was viewed by virtually every pundit in the world as the smart pick. Hindsight now paints a different picture, but as Pritchard explained drafting Oden wasn’t just about the player they thought they were getting.

“We had been really trying to change our culture for guys who really put the team first, not care about stats,” explained Pritchard. “And really be about winning. We thought he was the pick at the time. We did the same thing with Durant. They said he’s gonna be the best scorer in the league, he’s going to be an amazing player, and he’s gonna win. We just felt like Greg was going to be that guy that just doesn’t lose basketball games.”

As Pritchard recalls, Oden very earlier on showed the kind of leadership the team had hoped for which is likely why the team continues to stand behind him as a player.

“Right before he got hurt we were talking as a management group and we were like man doesn’t it feel like this is becoming a little bit like Greg’s team because in the locker room after a loss he would get really, really upset and he demands out of his teammates probably more than any other player I’ve been around other than Larry Bird.

“When he lost, he let his teammates knows what they have to do the next game. We were feeling so comfortable going into the rest of the second half of the season that we were going to be good because Greg was coming along.”

Pritchard has been active in NBA circles since being relieved in Portland and is believed to be a candidate to join the New York Knicks front office, possibly as Donnie Walsh’s replacement.

Pritchard has been a regular at NBA Draft events and according to sources has been doing some consulting work in and around the draft, something very common for former executives looking for new situations.

Make sure to check out the entire podcast interview.

Moving To The Front Office?  Adrian Wojnarowski and Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports are reporting the Minnesota Timberwolves - who still have not fired head coach Kurt Rambis - have floated the idea of Rambis serving out the final two years of his contract as a member of the Wolves’ front office.

The Wolves have been talking to candidates to replace Rambis in an informal way for several weeks with current Wolves’ assistant John-Blair Bickerstaff and University of Washington head coach Lorenzo Romar being the two names mentioned most.

The Wolves, according to Yahoo!, have not communicated with Rambis in several weeks, and while Kahn is believed to like the idea of reassignment versus outright firing, it’s believed such a move would be challenged in court as Rambis has no desire to scout for the Wolves.

Sources close to the situation say the relationship between Kahn and Rambis is beyond repair and the two sides barely spoke for the final two months of the season.

Wolves’ sources say Rambis blames his team’s failures on his assistant coaches, who apparently refused to buy into the Triangle offense Rambis tried to run and they often told players to deviate from the game plan.

Kahn asked Rambis to prepare a written report this offseason on what went wrong with the regular season and to detail out changes that would yield improvement.

Rambis submitted his report and met with Kahn several weeks ago, however both the Timberwolves and Kahn’s camp have said no firm decision has been made. It’s become clear Kurt Rambis is out in Minnesota, it’s unclear why the Wolves have not simply parted ways with a coach who is clearly a bad fit.

Their Numbers Versus Our Numbers: The public back and forth between The New York Times and the NBA over the validity of financial numbers brings up an interesting point – does any of that change the problem?

{AUTHOR_BOX}Sure the NBA and its Owners are claiming to have lost hundreds of millions over the life of this past collective bargaining agreement and have used those losses as the basis for a radical overhaul of the NBA’s economic system.

The Players Association and some in the media have openly disputed those claims. However, whether anyone believes the NBA’s position or not does not change fact there will not be NBA basketball again until a deal is reached and the NBA’s position is the deal that gets done won’t look anything like the deal that just ended.

To the casual observer this back and forth bickering over the math is petty, but the truth of the matter is the situation is so far past arguing over whether your numbers match my numbers it’s almost silly.

There are a few things worth noting.

The Forbes valuations are a best guess estimate based on known market conditions. The group at Forbes does as good a job as anyone in the business world at tracking the trends in sports and applying a uniform formula to the sports world.

It’s far from perfect, it’s far from accurate, but it’s a uniform measure. With valuations, especially sports team valuations, a lot of the sale price is in the eye of the beholder.

There hasn’t been a single transaction completed based on Forbes’ valuations and you can bet the next NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement won’t be crafted using Forbes’ numbers either - neither side would like how that math worked out.

The other thing to keep in mind on this numbers debate is if the NBA Players’ Association, who has been provided the certified accounting and filed tax returns for the entire league, genuinely believed the NBA was secretly turning a profit while cooking the books to show a loss, why did their last contract offer surrender 2.7% of their share of revenue, or some $110 million per year, in concessions?

In the court of public opinion it’s important to portray the Owners as greedy, money-grubbing profiteers, and the Players are being victimized and taken advantage of. That’s the game of all of this.

But at the end of the day the Owners will agree or not agree to a new deal and while the posturing over who did or did not make money is virtually irrelevant in the discussion, because the topic at hand is who will make money going forward.

There is a reason contracts have terms - it’s so that each side can reevaluate their end and insure they get what they want out of the deal.

For the last few years the NBA owners have not gotten what they wanted and their Forbes’ franchise valuations reflect that.

Michael Jordan has struggled to find minority investors in Charlotte. Atlanta Spirit has been pondering selling the Hawks. The Philadelphia 76ers are openly negotiating a sale now.

None of it is because they are secretly stuffing 50′s in a mattress, it’s because the financial landscape in the NBA is bleeding a number of owners dry.

If you talk to enough General Managers around the league you will hear more than one of them reference the restrictive budgets they have to maintain and the financial troubles their owners face in fielding a team.

That’s a very real problem in the NBA, and with the window open to force through changes, the NBA hasn’t locked out its players over hidden profits, they have locked out their players because the system is fundamentally broken at almost every level and now is the time to change it.