Rich Cho Says That He Has A Master Plan For The Blazers, But He's Not Telling Anyone About It

When the Blazers hired GM Rich Cho, I remember someone asking him a question that, paraphrasing, went something like "How close do you feel the team is to competing at a high level?" 

He responded that he thought the Blazers were one or two significant moves away from making the jump to competing for the Western Conference title.

This is no longer the case here in Portland.

A couple weeks back, Rich Cho joined Isaac and Suke on their afternoon show Primetime, which is on 1080 The Fan.  And they asked him how much he's had to change his plan for the team since he's taken over.  He said this, "Well, there's definitely been an adjustment. One thing I mentioned at my [introductory] press conference, I got the question, I'm paraphrasing, 'How close is this team to competing at a high level?' I mentioned that this team is a couple of moves away from competing at a high level. But that was assuming Brandon was going to be healthy and Greg was going to be healthy too. So there's definitely some adjustments that need to be made. We just have to move through it."

So the plan has definitely changed.  This practically goes without saying though, for any one that has checked in on the Blazers at all this season.  95.5 The Game's Jay Allen shed a bit more light on Cho's master plan a couple of days later with these tweets, after talking with Nicolas Batum.

We know now that Rich Cho doesn't plan on trading away Batum, at least not any time soon.  We personally believe that this is a smart move, and that Batum is now one of the players that you could call the "re-formed nucleus" of this team (Aldridge and Wesley Matthews being the rest of the nucleus).

As for the rest of Cho's master plan to take the Blazers to the next level, no one knows.  According to Jason Quick at the Oregonian, even coach Nate McMillian doesn't know.  Rich Cho told Quick that the reason that he's not going to share his plan with anyone, because if he shares it, other teams will know what he is trying to do.  He doesn't want to give any hints as to what his strategy is, which is obvious, but also smart.  I don't know about you, but we're hoping that Cho pulls off what he wants to pull off.  As fans, we're ready to watch this team get to that next level, whatever it takes.

At the end of his interview on The Fan, Cho was asked something along the lines of "will fans in Portland be aware of your plan by this year's trade deadline?"  And Cho said yes, that if he gets done what he is planning to get done, some of those moves will be happening here rather quickly.

So there's something for us to chew on for a couple weeks coming up here.

[ Blazersedge.com -- Transcript of the 1080 The Fan interview ]
[ Oregonlive.com -- Jason Quick story ]