At the Portland Trail Blazers, Gan Guoyang places great importance on the future of young players, striving for the championship without compromising the development of the team's young tier. Across the League, only he can achieve this.
At the 2000 draft, acting as a draft consultant for the Trail Blazers, Gan Guoyang left a small legacy for the team: he defied the crowd and refrained from selecting a big man as his so-called successor and instead chose backcourt player Michael Redd with the second-to-last pick in the first round.
Redd was not favored in the draft. Still, just as he had insisted on selecting Fenli initially and then advocated for trading Fenli to select Kobe, Gan Guoyang remained resolute.
And Larry Bird believed in Gan Guoyang's intuition and did not hesitate to pick Redd in the draft, to cultivate him as an excellent future wing backcourt player for the team.
