I’ve been pretty hard on the Portland Trail Blazers lately.
I could stand here and apologize for that, seeing as the team has now won nine of its last ten games.
But if anyone tells you they saw this turnaround coming from a team that was completely lost on both ends of the floor just a few weeks ago, they are lying.
Instead, I’ll say this: Enjoy the ride.
It has been a dark few years to be a Trail Blazers fan.
From shipping out the franchise’s best player to watching the remaining players seem to have no idea what they were doing to seeing the future faces of the team rotting on the bench, it has not exactly been fun.
It has been remarkable to suddenly see Deandre Ayton hustling at both ends, Scoot Henderson causing chaos on defense, and the whole team demonstrating cohesiveness on offense. It has taken nearly 3.5 years, but maybe Chauncey Billups has finally found his voice as a coach. In a span of two weeks, the Blazers went from potentially tanking for the No. 1 pick to closing to within 4 games of the final spot in the play-in tournament.
Reportedly, the change kicked off when Billups met repeatedly with Henderson and fellow rising star Shaedon Sharpe in December and January to encourage them to play better on defense and hold them accountable for sloppy play. He also encouraged the team to hold each other accountable for mistakes and to encourage each other.
Those talks appear to have taken hold, as Henderson is now flying all over the floor and playing with confidence not seen before, and the entire team finally appears to be playing together as a unit rather than five disjointed individuals.
Are the Trail Blazers as bad as they looked over the season’s opening months? Apparently not. Are they truly as good as they have played over the last two weeks? Probably not. And entirely buying into the idea that they carry some dangers with them. They still have an imbalanced roster with too many ball-handling guards and too many centers, and they let the trading deadline go past without unloading Jerami Grant’s albatross of a contract. If there’s anything that tempers the excitement of the team’s recent run, it’s that it should have happened a month ago or a month from now. Instead, running right up against the trade deadline left the team in the awkward position of knowing it has the assets it needs to move and not wanting to disrupt the chemistry of the team’s recent hot streak.
General Manager Joe Cronin chose the second option and stood pat at the deadline. That means that while the team didn’t trade away any members of a team that is hot right now, it also didn’t improve its chances for the future-whether that future be a play-in game this season or the culmination of the rebuild a year or two from now. The team also has a decision to make with Billups, who has been coaching for his job this season. The team has repeatedly turned down the chance to address his future. They have a one-year option for next season, but the front office seems content to play out the string and see how things stand at the end of the year before making any coaching decisions.
I’ll admit, I was dubious of the team when they first started their current streak. Most of the early games were spent beating Eastern Conference teams that were bad and hurt on the second night of a back-to-back, or all three at once. However, the team’s most recent two wins have given me hope to believe that the turnaround is real. They beat the Phoenix Suns convincingly twice in two nights at the Moda Center, and then in the second game of a back-to-back, they obliterated the Indiana Pacers. It wasn’t just that they won those three games; they convincingly won them all with tenacious defense and a well-rounded offense.
The Blazers’ upcoming schedule will show if their sudden turnaround can last. Six of their first seven post-trade deadline games are against Western Conference teams that are ahead of them in the standings. If they win those games, they will be right in the hunt for the play-in tournament. If they lose, they will be right back down near the bottom of the conference.
Whichever way the winds blow for the Blazers shortly, the past few weeks have been a breath of fresh air. It’s a good time for Blazers fans to sit back and enjoy the ride.
