"Trail Blazers president Larry Miller on Wednesday said he has started to work on establishing the criteria he will use in finding the team's next general manager, but he said those qualities, and the search in general, will be kept private.

"We have started to work on the qualities we are looking for, but I don't want to get into what they are,'' Miller said. "One of the things we are not going to do this time is conduct this search in the media as much as possible.''

The Blazers have been operating without a general manager since May 23, when it fired Rich Cho, who had the position for 10 months after replacing the fired Kevin Pritchard."