Roy on Penn being fired

Portland Trail Blazers guard Brandon Roy addressed the firing of Tom Penn, ex-Blazer vice president of basketball operations, following a workout Thursday at the team’s practice facility in Tualatin, Ore.

Roy on Penn’s unexpected firing:

We’ll miss him. But that seems to be this business. Guys come and go.

On whether the issue can be distracting:

No. I’m not easily distracted. I’m trying to fight to get into this playoff race, and I think guys know how important things are. And, again, guys get injured, you’ve got to play through it. Guys get traded, you’ve got to play through it. And that’s unfortunate what happened with him, but again, we’ve got to play through it. We’re trying to get as high as we can in this race; we’ve got teams on our heels. We don’t got time to really sit back. Maybe after the season, we can sit back and say, ‘Wow, that was a crazy year.’

On whether he has spoken with Blazers general manager Kevin Pritchard:

No, I haven’t. I seen him yesterday when I came into the weight room, but I was kind of like, ‘Hi.’ He was kind of busy, and I was getting ready to lift weights. But, no, we didn’t speak about anything.

On his first reaction to Penn being fired:

I was like, ‘Wow. I wonder what happened?’ Usually a guy gets fired, maybe something happened. But it was kind of just something that got brought to my attention. Nobody really knows. I don’t want to play detective. I’ll let you guys do that. Maybe you tell me what happened one day.