Portland fires coach Nate McMillian; waives Greg Oden

[benji]

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/76919 ... e-mcmillan

The Portland Trail Blazers have fired coach Nate McMillan.

The Blazers announced the move on Thursday, one day after a 42-point loss to the Knicks in New York. Assistant coach Caleb Kanales will be the interim head coach.

The Blazers have lost seven of their past 10 games to fall out of the Western Conference playoff race. The firing was part of an overhaul on Thursday that included trading veteran center Marcus Camby to the Houston Rockets and versatile forward Gerald Wallace to the New Jersey Nets.

Portland is 20-23 and in 12th place in the West. McMillan went 266-269 in over six seasons as coach of the Blazers and led them to the playoffs the previous three seasons.

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/76928 ... -greg-oden

Greg Oden's time with the Portland Trail Blazers, which effectively ended in February when it was announced that he would soon be undergoing his third microfracture knee surgery, is officially over now.

The Blazers waived Oden Thursday because they needed to create roster room to accommodate all the Portland players acquired earlier in the day in separate trades with New Jersey and Houston.

[The X]

Good riddance to both. They should've stopped paying Oden a little while back.

[Cleveland wins]

Wow, will Oden ever play again? What a shame.

[NovU]

Out for the season and was gonna be an unrestricted FA anyways.

[formx]

Finally.... I don't get why it took Portland this long to do so....

[Phil89]

Finally.... I don't get why it took Portland this long to do so....

Maybe they didn't want to get rid of him because then his bust status would be official. Probably wanted to give him every opportunity possible to get his body healthy. Not in terms of his ability, but that they wasted a number one pick on him and he barely played a season's worth of games.

Guess they're moving on now.

[benji]

They waived him because they needed the roster space for the trades and he's not going to play this season.

They had kept him around because if he did become healthy they wanted first dibs on him.

[_Steve_]

They waived him because they needed the roster space for the trades and he's not going to play this season.

They had kept him around because if he did become healthy they wanted first dibs on him.

That might never happen. So smart move by the Blazers...

[Andrew]

An unceremonious end for Nate McMillan. The handwriting was probably on the wall given their recent struggles, but he's a good coach so I expect he'll find another job sooner rather than later.

A real shame how it's gone down for Oden. I say kudos to the organisation for keeping him around and paying him. If he ever is able to play again then I wouldn't be too surprised if he looks to sign on there again for the minimum.

[mikec11]

With Portland's cancer-- Nate Mc'Millan --gone, everything from here looks promissing. Almost any coach in the league has a better offensive idea of the game.

[Lamrock]

Nate's offense always looked bad, and was maligned by a lot of fans. He turned athletic players into jump shooters, and the team often had long periods of stagnation. However, the numbers back him up as none of the guys he "under-utilized" really did much better when they left Portland. Travis Outlaw was amnestied after a year, Rudy still sucks, Bayless hasn't developed yet, Blake has fallen off, etc. Ironically, the one guy that did go off to have a better season upon leaving Nate's Blazers: Channing Frye, did so by being turned into a spot-up jump shooter!

But as sad as it was to see a coach I liked go, the team had definitely quit on him. Three games below .500 was unacceptable for a team with this much talent. I'm really glad they went with Canales, and not tank master Bernie Bickerstaff. No illusions that this is a playoff team now (it's definitely possible, but a lottery pick would probably be better in the end) but it should be fun to watch, and this guy might just become the new coach.

It sucks to see Greg Oden go. Would have preferred to see Luke Babbitt get waived, but I think they had already picked up his option for next year. He'll never play in the NBA again, but he was kind of the team's new unofficial mascot.