It’s been three seasons and counting since the Portland Trail Blazers made the playoffs, the longest stretch since 2004-2008 when they missed the playoffs five times in consecutive seasons. Barring some kind of miracle, Portland is doomed to miss the playoffs for the fourth straight season this year. The longest absence in postseason play in franchise history is six seasons, which hasn’t happened since the first six years the team was in the NBA from 1970-1976.
The last time this kind of drought occurred, the team was disbanded, and a new roster was put together so you could understand why it took a few years to right the ship. But the current situation is tough, as this is technically year three of a rebuild that doesn’t seem any closer to being a contender today than when they started.
This team isn’t just absent from the list of title contenders; they haven’t even had a winning season since 2021 and are currently putting together one of their worst winning percentages in franchise history. The Blazers currently have a winning percentage of .256, which matches their 1973 and 2006 seasons when they went 21-61. They have only recorded a winning percentage lower than that one time – their awful second season in 1971-72 when they won just 18 games.
I am sure Portland can win at least one more game this year, but it leads everyone to wonder how bad this team really is when we are at the end of January, and they have shown more signs of looking like the worst teams in franchise history than they have shown glimpses they are a team on the rise.
By my count, this is the 7th time the team has built a new roster, and in the six times that occurred in the past, each of those teams had a future superstar to build around. They had a Batman to help them compete and a group of sidekicks that could help them get to the next level.
In 1970, they had Geoff Petrie.
In 1983, they had Clyde Drexler.
In 1997, they had Rasheed Wallace.
In 2006, they had Brandon Roy.
In 2012, they had Damian Lillard.
Who is coming to the rescue this time?
They have made a slew of trades in the past couple of years to improve the team in short order, bringing in Deandre Ayton, Toumani Camara, Robert Williams, Matisse Thybulle, and Deni Avdija. Avdija has arguably been the brightest spot on the roster, especially the last couple of weeks, but this is his 5th season, so which is more likely, that he finally found the magic switch at the end of his 5th year or that this is just a special run during an unlikely winning streak and he will level out?
There has always been a player we knew was the guy on the roster. In the current rebuild, it was supposed to be Shaedon Sharpe, then it was Scoot Henderson, now maybe it’s Donovan Clingan, or it could be Deni Avdija. Or perhaps it’s none of them. Maybe they have too many “this could be the guy” players and not one you can identify as the true franchise player.
That’s a problem. That’s not “a wealth of riches”; it’s “your card was declined for insufficient funds”.
This isn’t a team of castoffs and misfits like the rosters that took the court in 1970 or 2004. This team has plenty of potential, but most of it is unrealized. Their drafts have not been spectacular, but they haven’t been disastrous either. To the point, Portland can’t get into the playoffs or get a really good pick. It’s the ultimate phantom zone, and who knows when they will get out.
Portland didn’t have a draft pick in 2021 when you could argue the rebuild started. At the time they traded away the pick, they still had Lillard on the roster and wanted to acquire a two-way forward they thought would pair well with him, but it didn’t work out.
In 2022, they selected Shaedon Sharpe with the #7 pick and selected Jabari Walker with the #57 pick.
In 2023, they selected Scoot Henderson with the #3 pick, Kris Murray with the #23 pick, and Rayan Rupert with the #43 pick.
In 2024, they selected Donovan Clingan with the #7 pick and traded the #14 pick as part of the deal to bring Avdija to town.
None of those drafts are bad, but again, who is the player they are building around? You can’t build around the idea of a player. You have to build around an actual player.
It’s a challenging position because they don’t have the established talent in veterans or youth to compete with the good teams, and they don’t have such a lack of talent that they are diving headfirst into a lottery pick. In fact, if they win a few more games, they might even play their way out of the lottery. With just 18 going on 19 wins so far, it’s not likely they will be among the top 15 teams in the league, but it would be just like the Blazers to go on an unlikely run this time of year just to mess up their chances at a high pick they desperately need.
They also have to figure out what to do with Jerami Grant, a really good player with no business closing out his career on a team going nowhere. But with his age and contract, it will be tough to move him. Then there is the case of Anfernee Simons, who is an excellent shooter but does almost nothing else and probably isn’t a true point guard but isn’t big enough to guard elite shooting guards. Do you send him to New Orleans like his previous version, or is that just when you have held him here way past, when his best offers are long gone, and he’s been exposed as a one-trick pony?
Then there is Ayton. If Clingan is as good as he appears to be, there is no reason to keep Ayton. But between his contract and the lack of interest other teams will have in him these days, he’s going to be in a situation similar to Meyers Leonard and Jusuf Nurkic, where you have to lose money on the deal to get him off the roster, which is odd because unloading Nurkic was precisely how they got Ayton in the first place.
There are a lot of issues to solve, and I don’t pretend to know how they are going to make it happen, but seeing the local team with 18 wins in the last week of January is pretty depressing. They probably need to start with a change in head coach and then let the new coach decide who they can work with long-term.
This isn’t the team Chauncy Billups signed on to coach, and it sure doesn’t seem to be a team he’s interested in or capable of coaching. He did not intend to go from the assistant coach on a talent-rich roster competing for a championship to a team needing leadership and rebuilding. When he got here, he had Lillard still in his prime and a very talented roster around him, needing a former player with a championship background to get them over the hump.
They needed the next Steve Kerr to help them become the next Golden State Warriors. Instead, they got the next Steve Nash to help them become the next Brooklyn Nets. If there is anything the world doesn’t need right now, it’s more of the Brooklyn Nets.
More than anything, they need to find their Batman. They have too many players who are a lot of Robins; it’s time to find Batman.
Fire up the Bat- Signal. We need our hero, and we need him now.
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