Trail Blazers Commit to Joe Cronin's Vision With Major Franchise Decisions Looming

📍PORTLAND, Ore. — There are a lot of things still to be decided about the future of the Trail Blazers. But the organization took one of those questions off the table on Monday.

Whatever the next era of the Blazers’ on-court product looks like, Joe Cronin will be the one guiding it, after the team announced a multi-year contract extension with the general manager on Monday morning.

“Joe has demonstrated leadership and vision during his time as General Manager, and I’m excited to see him continue building the foundation for a long-term, winning team,” Blazers and Vulcan chair Jody Allen said in a rare public statement as part of the team’s announcement. “We are all thrilled with the team’s forward momentum and excited for the future of Trail Blazers basketball.”

Cronin, who started with the Blazers as a basketball operations intern in 2006, has stayed with the organization through several front-office regime changes and was named interim general manager in December of 2021 when Neil Olshey was fired for workplace code-of-conduct violations. Cronin got the job on a permanent basis the following spring after executing a major trade-deadline sell-off that shipped out veterans C.J. McCollum, Norman Powell and Robert Covington while Damian Lillard recovered from a core muscle surgery.

A new deal for Cronin comes at a crucial point for the franchise on a few fronts.

In the second year of their post-Lillard rebuild, the Blazers have made legitimate progress towards being a playoff team again. They were only eliminated from play-in contention on Sunday, with a week left in the regular season, after being projected by most analysts to once again be one of the worst teams in the NBA (their Vegas over/under win total before the season was 21.5). Two of Cronin’s trade acquisitions, Deni Avdija and Toumani Camara, have been driving a lot of that unexpected winning.

But there’s still a lot to figure out this summer about the roster. With the emergence of Avdija and Camara and improvement from two of Cronin’s defining lottery picks, Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe, he’ll have decisions to make about the futures of veterans like Anfernee Simons and Jerami Grant.

That’s to say nothing of the decision Cronin will have to make in the coming days about the future of head coach Chauncey Billups, who is finishing the final guaranteed year of his contract.

The Blazers hold a team option on Billups’ contract for next season that, to this point, has not been picked up. Going back to last offseason, the assumption from all sides has been that Billups would finish out this season and then the sides would mutually agree to part ways.

But after Billups presided over the Blazers’ dramatic second-half improvement (with three games left, they’re 22-16 since the midway point of the season) and kept the buy-in of players through some truly ugly losses in the first half of the season, there’s at least a conversation that will be had internally about bringing him back.

Figuring out Cronin’s long-term future was something that needed to happen, whichever way the coaching decision goes. Whether the Blazers are trying to sell an extension to Billups (who has a lot of fans around the NBA and will have other options if he hits the coaching market) or sell the job to a new coach if they decide to move on, knowing that the general manager is in place is an important public show of stability at the top.

Whatever decision Cronin makes, it will be one that defines his tenure as the Blazers’ general manager. GMs often don’t get too many opportunities to hire their own coach. Billups was Olshey’s hire back in 2021; if Cronin recommits to him this summer, he becomes his coach, and a reflection of the front office’s belief that the second half of this season is enough to go on in making a decision that will shape the next half-decade.

Either way, it’s a massive decision Cronin will have to make about the future of the Blazers, up there with the other big ones he’s had to make. 

Drafting Henderson with the No. 3 overall pick in 2023, rather than trading for more veteran help and effectively sealing the end of the Lillard era, was one. Henderson has taken major steps in his second season and largely eased concerns about the rocky start to his career, but he still has a long way to go to be the kind of franchise cornerstone he was sold as on draft night.

Navigating the months-long spectacle of Lillard’s trade request that same summer and public attempts to strong-arm his way to Miami was another. Cronin came out very well in the eventual deal he made with Milwaukee and Phoenix, landing Camara and several future Bucks picks, upgrading the starting center spot from Jusuf Nurkic to Deandre Ayton, and turning Jrue Holiday into assets he later used to trade for Avdija. More than that, he demonstrated that, despite his approachable and soft-spoken demeanor, he wouldn’t be pushed into making a bad deal and was willing to wait out the market for the right one.

The Blazers’ first post-Lillard season was largely a wasted year due to injuries, without much in the way of real development or progress. This season has been the opposite. Even putting aside the unexpected number of wins, they’ve improved from the NBA’s third-worst defense in the first half of the season to fourth-best in the second half. The “identity” and “connectivity” that Cronin and Billups have preached publicly for several years have finally gone from cliched buzzwords to tangible results.

A year ago, it was hard to make the argument that the Blazers were moving in the right direction. Today, it’s hard to make the argument that they aren’t.

Here’s Cronin’s newest challenge, beyond determining whether Billups or somebody else will be coaching the team moving forward: Recognizing that tanking for another high lottery pick is no longer realistic with this group improving as much as it did this year, and making roster upgrades to further that growth and push towards the playoffs, but not going so far in that direction that it boxes them into the exact kind of long-term purgatory they were in for most of Lillard’s prime.

It’s not going to be an easy job. But Monday’s contract extension ensures that Cronin will have the runway and trust to see his vision through.