The Portland Trail Blazers have finally determined their future direction.
And the future doesn’t look much different than the present.
As their most successful season in four years wound down, Trail Blazers ownership decided to give job security to the same folks who had overseen that same four-year stretch. The Blazers first handed a contract extension to general manager Joe Cronin, who inherited the position in 2021 after the team fired then-general manager Neal Olshey. A few days later, the team announced a contract extension for coach Chauncey Billups, who had been hired by Olshey just weeks before Olshey was fired in 2021 following allegations of creating a hostile work environment.
Cronin has overseen the team’s transition out of the Damian Lillard era, accumulating a pile of future draft picks and building a young core around Donavan Clingan, Scoot Henderson, Shaedon Sharpe, Deni Avdija, and Toumani Camara.
Billups’ tenure has been a strange one. He was brought in with zero head coaching experience as a defensive-minded players’ coach, hoping to keep Lillard around and get the team to the NBA finals. However, when Lillard began to get hurt, the team flamed out, and after two years of sub-.500 records, the team hit the reset button and left Billups in charge of a completely different team than the one he had been hired to lead. In a dismal 21-61 campaign in 2023-24, he often looked as lost as the team on the floor. Finally, in the second half of the 2024-25 campaign, he appeared to find his voice and began getting players to buy into his system.
However, at the end of the four guaranteed years on his contract, he has a 117-211 record. Having twice as many losses as wins doesn’t typically earn a contract extension. But the Trail Blazers made Billups the exception to the rule. Meanwhile, in Memphis and Denver, coaches Taylor Jenkins and Mike Malone were canned in the season’s waning weeks simply because they didn’t have their teams in a high enough playoff spot. In Phoenix, Mike Budenholzer, a well-regarded coach with a championship on his resume, was fired after one season.
That’s not to say that the Blazers should necessarily follow the example of those franchises. Phoenix, for example, appears to be in full dumpster fire mode. They missed the playoffs despite having the highest payroll in the league and are now looking for their fourth head coach in four years.
However, there is something to be said about feeling urgency and making a change to improve. Both the Grizzlies and the Nuggets moved on from their coaches in the middle of the playoff chase to try to push their teams to the next level.
The Trail Blazers appear to be perfectly content to stay at the level they are at.
That approach may get the Trail Blazers into the play-in round next season as other teams ahead of them hit their own rebuilds, but it won’t push them into the upper echelon of the Western Conference.
For most of Billups’ and Cronin’s tenures, the Trail Blazers have been perfectly “meh.” It is not bad enough to get a No. 1 pick that could bank them a superstar to build around, but it is also not good enough to be a playoff contender. They have some solid pieces in place, but don’t have a true superstar or any A-list vets on the team to attract other top-tier players. If you were to look up the definition of “mostly harmless lower mid-tier NBA team,” you would find the team’s logo.
The Trail Blazers simply have no reason to make that push to the next level. They continue to be in a weird ownership stasis, with Jody Allen obligated to sell the team at some indeterminate point in the future, an arena that will be getting some minor upgrades to stay in the NBA’s middle class, and a decent attendance record. None of those things appear likely to change. And now the team’s leadership will not be either. To be fair to the team, sticking with Cronin and Billups may not necessarily pin the team to them long-term. While terms of Cronin’s extension have not been revealed, Billups is reportedly for three years, with the team exercising its option for next season and then taking on two beyond that.
With Jenkins, Malone and Budenholzer all on the open market, as well as the annual bevy of up and coming assistant, the Trail Blazers had the opportunity to assess their long term future and decide if Billups was who they wanted long term, or if someone else was the right person to take the team out of mediocrity and to the next level.
The team didn’t even need to wait until the end of the season to look around the league and make their decision: The Portland Trail Blazers are perfectly content right where they are.
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