Former Thunder Executive Rich Cho Hired As Blazers’ New General Manager

The Blazers’ long, weird general manager search is finally at it’s end. According to Ben Golliver of SB Nation’s Blazers blog Blazers Edge, the team has hired Rich Cho to be the team’s new general manager.

Cho had been the assistant GM for the Oklahoma City Thunder, a rising young team that has been universally praised for their creativity in accumulating assets and young talent. Considering the circumstances surrounding former GM Kevin Pritchard’s firing and the lingering threat of ownership meddling too much in personnel moves, the Blazers did extremely well to get someone as up-and-coming as Cho.

After axing Kevin Pritchard an hour before the 2010 NBA Draft -- and then asking him to stick around and run the Blazers’ war room -- it appears a front-runner has emerged in the search for Portland’s new GM. According to Jason Quick of The Oregonian, the Blazers’ GM job belongs to former Cavs GM Danny Ferry, if he wants it.

Effectively trading Pritchard for Ferry would be a puzzling move, to say the least, for the Blazers. In his five years as Cleveland’s GM, Ferry failed to find a sidekick for Lebron, whiffing on Larry Hughes in free agency, then patching up the holes in the roster with a series of decent moves that still failed to add the requisite firepower to Cleveland’s roster. Pritchard was playing with a stacked deck with Paul Allen’s deep pockets in Portland, to be sure -- being able to buy and stockpile draft picks and take on more salary -- but his track record the past few years was much better, before being fired for no apparent reason.

The bar has just been raised for crazy sports owner everywhere (Dan Snyder, I’m looking at you to top this). After reportedly searching for a new GM the past few weeks, Blazers owner Paul Allen has fired GM Kevin Pritchard -- an hour before the NBA Draft is set to begin, according to Jason Quick of The Oregonian.

But that’s not the best part. No, if Allen were merely axing his wildly successful GM for no apparent reason on the eve of the draft, that’d be nuts, but it wouldn’t quite reach the level of mind-numbing illogic we’re currently at. Indeed, the Blazers are going to have Pritchard run their draft for them, before sending him packing in the morning. Seriously. If this sounds like a set for the plot of the movie Major League (only it’s the GM who wants to tank and not the owner), well, that’s because it is.

Things change quickly in the NBA. One day you’re regarded as one of the brightest front office minds in the game, cleaning up a mess of a franchise and rapidly returning them to respectability, and the next you’re...well this:

According to Yahoo!‘s Adrian Wojnarowski’s report, the Blazers have targeted at least two current NBA executives, including Thunders boy wonder Sam Presti, who will almost assuredly not leave Oklahoma City now that he has them on the cusp of becoming legit contenders.