Ford: Trade Market Is Crowded For Blazers, Who Can Find Value By Drafting Shooter At No. 10

Casey Holdahl of Blazers.com has a transcript of an interview with ESPN.com's Chad Ford, conducted by Travis Demers and Josh Wilcox on 1080 AM The Fan, that touches on the Portland Trail Blazers' position heading into the 2013 NBA Draft.

Audio of the interview is here. The full transcript is here.

A lot of fans think the Trail Blazers should trade the No. 10 pick. How difficult is it going to be to trade a pick in this year's draft in that range?

Well when you have 25 teams selling, it's tough, and that seems to be the consensus on virtually every team, including the team at the top, the Cleveland Cavaliers. This is a draft where there's no clear No. 1 pick. There's no clear top-tier players in the draft. A lot of the teams in the lottery don't really want to be in the lottery, don't want to take the long route of building through the lottery so they would like to go ahead and try to find a player maybe that can help them now. And so you're seeing literally from every team in the top 10 talk about trading this pick. That makes it much harder. If people were coveting draft picks and you were one of the few teams willing to give it up, you could get a lot for that. But right now this is a buyers market all the way because so many teams are trying to sell.

A lot of projections have the Trail Blazers selecting a big man with their pick, be it Alex Len (if he falls that far), Kelly Olynyk or Cody Zeller. How much sense does it take for Portland to draft a center considering they already have Meyers Leonard, who is a project in his own right?

I think it's okay. I think, personally, that they're much more likely to go get a shooter and I think there's a lot stronger batch of shooters in this draft than there are bigs right now. If you're going to draft a big at ten, my feeling is you're reaching a little bit to draft him. I think the Blazers reached just a little bit even with Meyers Leonard but that happens every year with bigs, teams will reach a little ahead of time. If you want value, you go for a shooter, and I think one of two guys, either C.J. McCollum out of Lehigh or Kentavious Caldwell-Pope out of Georgia, those guys should be there when the Blazers are drafting.

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What is the consensus on Neil Olshey's ability to make moves and how aggressive he will be?

Oh, I think he's very aggressive. I think he's a very creative GM and I think he's one that has good relationships with people around the league. And look, he's got Paul Allen behind him, which means he has the resources to make moves if he wants to make moves. I think the challenge this year -- as we just talked about at the beginning -- is it's crowded. It's crowded. There's a lot of teams wanting to make moves, a lot of teams wanting to trade. That typically means you don't get high returns.

-- Ben Golliver | benjamin.golliver@gmail.com | Twitter