Charlotte's surprise, the Nike Hoop Summit and more waiting

It didn't take long at the Nike Hoop Summit to know the Blazers are in for at least one more year at the bottom of the NBA standings.

We'll let you guys prophesy
We gon' see the future first - Nikes by Frank Ocean

PORTLAND, Ore. –– I saw the future this past weekend at the Nike Hoop Summit. At the very least, I got a glimpse at what the next 82 Portland Trail Blazers games will look like because of the talent at the Nike Hoop Summit. The Hoop Summit had me feeling So Very Raven, because the future was as clear as could be. I’m very sorry to those of you who were looking for a more positive immediate outlook on the franchise. Portland’s next 82 games will look a lot like the last 246 games. It’s gonna be a whole lot of losing.

So hurry up and wait. I’m not here to tell you a shiny new ownership group is coming to save the day, because I don’t want to lie to you to sell subscriptions. If you need the team’s competitiveness to buy season tickets or a streaming package next season, I’m telling you right now to save your money. Even though Charlotte’s surprise win on the final day of the season gave the Blazers a 13% chance at the No. 1 pick in 2024, what I saw this past weekend is that the 2025 Draft is too enticing for the Blazers to stop their tanking ways before it arrives.

When it comes to the 2024 Draft, depending on who you ask and when you ask, who “the prize” is changes dramatically. Some days it’s Alex Sarr. Some days it’s Zaccharie Risacher. To some, it might still be Ron Holland. You ask someone else and they’ll say it’s Reed Shephard. You ask a couple of weeks from now and it might be none of the above. The main takeaway, with this much change, is that almost none of the players in the 2024 Draft are worth the No. 1 pick. 2025, however, promises to have debates over the top pick for different reasons, with more players who can deliver on that kind of hype.

Of course, you might say hey, didn’t these guys (draft experts and Joe Cronin himself) say Scoot Henderson was one of the most NBA-ready guard prospects in years and he fell short of that expectation? Yes, that’s true, but on the other hand, those same people told us about Victor Wembanyama for years and they were right. In fact, Wemby’s hype some how undersold how good he was. Draft scouting, even by people and organizations who are paid enormous amounts of money by NBA teams to get it right, is a mixed bag. While I didn’t see Cronin himself at the Hoop Summit events I went to, I saw plenty of his Basketball Operations staff, such as Director of Basketball Strategy Asjha Jones and Assistant GM/Draft Guru Mike Schmitz.

When I saw Cooper Flagg’s turnaround jumper and his disruptive defensive presence at 6-10 in person, I realized we were staring at another year of losing Blazer basketball. When you see the length of Ace Bailey and his ability to hit tough shots at all three levels, it’s impossible to assume the Blazers changing their posture. They fell eight games short of passing this season’s over-under of 28.5. If next year’s number is anything above 24.5 to start next season I would be shocked. After seeing the kids at Hoop Summit, I became even more convinced that the Blazers didn’t tank this far only to tank this far.

And look, tanking is a shitty place to be. And unlike other sports towns, there’s very little in the market to take your mind off of it. With all due respect to the Timbers and Thorns, there’s no NFL team, no NHL team, no baseball team and no WNBA team. Thanks to Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum, the Blazers avoided tanks, even when they were attempted by the previous regime, so everyone is out of practice. But as long as the NBA rewards its worst teams with a shot at the best talent, losing is one of the only surefire ways to get superstar talent to a market like Portland. The last two All-Stars Portland had on its roster, Dame and LaMarcus Aldridge, were both top draft picks. So when Joe Cronin told reporters on Monday that Chauncey Billups would be back as head coach, it was what I expected, even as fans share their displeasure with Billups every time Mark Mason introduces him over the public address system.

While this franchise has seen plenty of bad teams, another season of sustained losing would be something this franchise hasn’t seen in nearly two decades. The last time the Blazers had a sustained playoff drought was from 2004 to 2008. Assuming they miss it next season, they will be in a drought from 2022 to 2025, while trying to sell hope they can break that cycle in 2026. It’s not something uncommon in franchise history, but it’s certainly something that is unfamiliar, especially after the sustained competence of the Lillard Era. But it’s also necessary.

Back in January when the Seattle Seahawks, who are also owned by Jody Allen and Bert Kolde, fired Pete Carroll, it was the first time I thought that Chauncey Billups would not return as head coach next year. Carroll’s firing also coincided with the first of two historic 60-point losses. If Jody Allen and Bert Kolde could circle the wagons to fire a coach with the equity and cache of Carroll, I told myself, they could easily let go of Billups in favor of a new coach. But that notion was short-lived. The Seahawks came up just short of the NFL playoffs and coaching changes taking a team from good to great are much more common than ones that take a team from the bottom of the league to to perennial contender status. In short, it doesn’t really matter who is holding the clipboard.

And while on a macro level things didn’t change much, there were minor wins for Billups after their awful January road trip, that I believe helped him secure another year on the bench.

The first of which was his handling of Scoot Henderson. Henderson, as stated above, was touted by Cronin and draft experts to be ready to contribute at the NBA level. Thrust into the starting lineup immediately, he struggled mightily and upon his return from injury, Billups slowly brought Henderson along by giving him a bench role. While it’s en vogue among Blazers fans to remove Billups from any positive player development, it’s simply impossible to do in the case of Henderson.

The second W for Billups was the win in Lillard’s return to Portland. Running plays that attacked Lillard down the stretch, as well as not instructing his young team to make sure Dame didn’t get a look at a game winner, thus scoring a win in Portland’s only nationally televised game of the season, helped create a selling point for Billups, a game he called “a culture win” at the time. As analytical as I try to be, the emotions of winning that game can’t be overlooked as a factor in why he is staying on. This is sports, after all, not simply a matter of dollars and cents.

Of course, Billups’ mistakes were aplenty. Perhaps my biggest gripe with his coaching was not realizing what he had in Deandre Ayton. He only upped Ayton’s usage rate when injuries and historically bad losses forced him to look at other options. And of course, there’s the other side of the emotions coin. While the organization could rally around the emotion of beating Milwuakee, the fan base clearly does not feel the same way about that one singular win. The only time the boos stopped for Chauncey was when the organization congratulated him on his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

But while his handling of Scoot turned out to be a positive, the same can’t be said for his handling of Portland’s other lottery pick, Shaedon Sharpe, in Sharpe’s second season. Playing Sharpe over 40-minutes per game in early November led to Sharpe getting injured and missing most of the season. I also thought there were times that Billups forced Scoot and Simons to start games together when it clearly wasn’t working, in order to motivate Sharpe to earn his spot in the starting lineup, as well as see if the two point guards could work together. Sharpe never earned his spot back. Part of it was due to Sharpe’s injuries. But in my opinion, Billups may need to re-evaluate how he handled Sharpe this season, because it’s clear Sharpe is a different cat.

But that doesn’t mean that Billups is unable to reach his players with moves like taking away minutes. In the case of Toumani Camara, benching him at midseason in favor of Jabari Walker worked to perfection. If Camara doesn’t get benched, he likely isn’t motivated enough to realize his offense was hurting his effectiveness and his second-half surge to finish the season doesn’t materialize. Because of that surge, Camara separated himself from many of Portland’s other wing prospects and as of right now, is the prize of the Lillard trade, which is also looking more and more like the right move just in the nick of time.

But above all else, the team is in no rush to make the playoffs, or even the play-in. Sometimes, very rarely, can a coaching change can take a team from one of the worst teams in the league to a respectable team. But the only proven way to do that in the 75-plus years of NBA history is landing a star. Take the Magic for example, with Paolo Banchero taking the Magic from the No. 1 pick to the playoffs in two seasons. But if all of this sustained losing doesn’t result in Portland landing a star player, Cronin, no matter who the coach is, will likely be looking new job. So for Cronin’s job and for the long-term outlook of the franchise, they’re left with no choice but to lose again next season.

If you need to take a gap-year and paying attention to this team is draining you, by all means take another year off. But as painful as the last three springs have been, it would be worse for the franchise’s outlook if they passed up an opportunity to land the type of player they’ve been searching for since the spring of 2022. With all due respect to the current roster, that player isn’t there yet.

Anfernee Simons, Portland’s best player, showed growth as a playmaker this season but still struggled with consistency and is most likely best cast as a No. 2 option on a good team. Scoot showed flashes of brilliance, but he wasn’t exactly a young Kyrie out there. Sharpe has elite tools and plays hard on both ends, but has yet to display that he has the mindset to turn those tools into stardom. Sharpe’s trajectory appears to be at a fork in the road. He has the talent of a Young Kobe, but he could just as easily become J.R. Smith or Gerald Green.

So as of right now all we know is that the Blazers don’t have The Guy yet and that they’re going to be bad next year. But when you watch Cooper Flagg, Ace Bailey, Khaman Maluach, VJ Edgecombe and the rest of the incoming 2025 class, as well as 2026 guard AJ Dybansta, it’s also not that hard to see why the Blazers front office is looking in their direction. And it has nothing to do with who is holding the clipboard.

End of Season Notes

• First of all, thank you to everyone who subscribes to this Newsletter. Personally, it was a tough year for me and I wrote a lot less as a result. I lost my Dad, a Portland-born Blazers fan, in February. He always used to tell me about summer pick-up runs at PSU when he was younger against Bill Walton and the rest of those teams when they were looking for an offseason workout. What a different time, a Finals MVP playing pick-up against kids at the local college. But anyway, this is a long way of me saying that loss took a lot out of me. There are a lot of days when it still does. I found it hard to write beyond my AP responsibilities, which is usually just a game recap here and there. Ultimately, when you lose a parent, things like Chauncey’s rotations become a lot less fucking important. But without my Dad, I wouldn’t have ever taken a liking to basketball and or learned what it took to actually write anything. Like Bubs said in The Wire, “there ain’t no shame in holding onto grief, just as long as you make room for other things too.” And one of those other things was having a community around this team. Even when they are three wins short of the worst record in franchise history, this team is one of the few things that made me feel like myself again. Every time I go to the Rose Garden, I think about the times he took me as a kid. As well as the times he and my Mom came to games when I got an internship with the team and later became a beat writer covering the team. So even though the team didn’t win, I honestly didn’t care. I was thankful to have games to go to and memories that made me remember better times. I love you Dad, wish you were still here.

• I also want to give a special shout out to Sean Highkin. Not only does he have the best coverage of this team over at the Rose Garden Report, but he was a great friend to me throughout a very difficult time for me that not many other people knew about.

• I would be absolutely shocked if Malcolm Brogdon is on the team next year. While I thought he did fill a role as a veteran player with a strong level of competence, I think Dalano Banton’s play in the second half of the season warrants a longer look at him. And even though Banton is much bigger than Brogdon, they effectively play the same position.

• Speaking of Banton, I have never been happier to be so wrong about a player. A few years ago, just before the Blazers traded CJ, my friend Brock and I went to a Blazers-Raptors game and we left convinced that Banton was the worst player in the NBA. How he played to finish the season is a good lesson that players are never finished products. Much like Toumani Camara, the Blazers may have found a piece worth keeping in an unlikely place. Neither are stars, but both look like the types of players you want on your team when you finally get The Guy.

• I mentioned Alex Sarr and I have heard a lot of Blazers fans express concern about drafting him when they already have Deandre Ayton on the roster. While Ayton showed his ability in the 2nd half of the season, the franchise should not be basing any decisions about the long-term future of the team around “does this guy work with Ayton?” I like Ayton and thought he could have been made a focal point in the offense earlier than he was. But if they believe Sarr is the best guy and they have the opportunity to take him, they should take him, positional redundancy be damned. Also, this team started Robert Williams and Jabari Walker alongside Ayton, so it’s not as if a lack of 3-point shooting at the 4 will prevent them from at least taking a look at playing them together.

• While I think next year’s results will look a lot like this year’s results, this team is likely going to look a lot different. I mentioned Brogdon, but the Blazers also have 4 picks in the top 40 of this draft. Even if they only use two of those picks, that means two players from this year’s squad will have to go. I don’t know know who is staying and who is going, but there will be a lot of new faces next year.

• While finishing at the bottom of the standings is a lock next season, I really do think the Blazers should try to make a run at the knockout stage of the In-Season Tournament in 24-25. I said the same thing before the start of this season, but that was before the In-Season got buy-in from the players. The Blazers should become the first team to say making the IST knockout stage is an in-season goal. They literally have nothing else to play for. Plus, it’s over in December, which leaves plenty of time to lose games before the end of the season.

• The next time you hear from me will probably be the draft lottery. So, until then, enjoy the NBA playoffs. Maybe you’ll remember what competitive hoop is supposed to look like.