Nobody Knows How To Act And That's OK
As the Blazers reach the halfway point of another lost season, it's important to remember that nobody around here knows how to act, because this is totally foreign to this franchise.
When you do your intern orientation for the Portland Trail Blazers, you get the full court press of indoctrination about the team history. The key moments, the key figures and the things that organization is proud of. All of those things get told to you in the form of a video that recaps where the Trail Blazers have been in order to inspire those who are just entering the organization to take them where they will go next.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that video lately as we see another Blazers season circle the drain. They might not even use the same video to indoctrinate the interns anymore, the one I’m referring to was shown to me and the rest of our class of interns before the 2012-13 season. But the thing I remember most from that video wasn't how they highlighted the 1977 team, the 90s Finals Appearances or the revitalization of the franchise during the B-Roy/LaMarcus years. It was a number. Something, perhaps the only measurable outcome, in which the Blazers franchise could be considered among the NBA Elite.
21 straight years of playoff appearances from 1983 to 2003, tied for the second-longest such streak in NBA History.
This fact and this streak, not only for Blazers fans who came to expect a basic level of competence for their team, but for the people who work for the team, is one of the biggest reasons the patience around here is waring thin with the paying customer. Nobody knows how to act because this team has never been this bad for this many consecutive years since they were an expansion franchise in the 1970s. This isn’t what people have become accustomed to paying money for. And it’s OK that they don’t know how to act or what to expect, because what evidence is there to trust there is another side to all this losing?
It is for this reason that every six weeks or so, someone says it’s a crisis that Deandre Ayton is still on the roster, without discussing: the two players who Portland traded for Ayton are either A) not in the NBA (Nassir Little) or B) have been completely removed from the rotation and also might not be in the NBA very much longer (Jusuf Nurkic), or that Ayton only has one more year on his deal after this season ends. Nevertheless, Ayton Anxiety is a symptom of a greater sickness: the expectation of baseline competence, the kind that prevented the Blazers from ever getting a prospect like Shaedon Sharpe in the last 30 years.
But that doesn’t mean it’s all good. It’s for this reason the boos are getting louder every game for Chauncey Billups. It’s for this reason that the arena is rarely at capacity. Paying customers have come to expect a basic level of competence for this franchise, the franchise hangs on that basic level of competence as a brand pillar, but nobody is seeing competence and nobody who pays is getting a discount because they suck.
Even when Scoot Henderson is asked about his improved production as of late, he shuffles off the question because, according to him, his job is to “lead the team to wins.” There’s no playbook around here for this. The franchise is playing a role that is out of step with the brand they built in this town.
With less than three weeks to go until the trade deadline, almost two years after Damian Lillard played his last game in a Blazers uniform, many of the people brought in to help Lillard are somehow still here. It’s hard to get excited about the young players of the future when reminders of their past failure to build around Dame still walk the halls and roam the sidelines.
The Blazers, while they do have some exciting young players, have waited far too long to give those exciting young players the runway they need to figure out how good they actually are. And the trade market, due to the restrictions of the second apron and the new CBA that went into effect last year, has completely cooled off. While the Blazers are pretty quiet on their end about how much they value players like Grant and Simons, it seems to this semi-trained eye, that the market for players like them is not what it was last trade deadline or even last summer. And the Blazers should consider taking the L on both players, just like they do on the court on a nightly basis.
With three weeks to go before the deadline, it’s not outlandish to say that not only did the Blazers misread the market for Grant and Simons, but that those decisions actually harmed the development of their most promising players. And the fans, those who pay for tickets and BlazerVision or Digital Antennas, are made to suffer while the team remains in purgatory.
So yes, nobody around here knows how to act. And that’s OK. Because as long as this team has existed, they’ve have rarely been this bad for this long. So let it all out, keep booing and demand that you get results. Because just like the franchise has never been this bad for this long, the people currently in charge haven’t yet shown the ability to build a competent team on the other side.
The time for trusting the process is starting to run out, because at this time next year, there needs to be some results. Or else the people in charge of the process probably won’t be the ones cleaning up the mess that currently exists. For better or worse, this franchise is a far, far away from the things the franchise used to be proud of.