The Portland Trail Blazers’ 2025-26 schedule was released yesterday. While all teams play 82 games, not every schedule is created exactly equal, either from team to team or year to year. After perusing Portland’s, here are several things that stand out.

I’ll never forget the feeling I had looking at the schedule during the Summer of 1991. This was my first year with any usable disposable income and I knew just how I wanted to spend it: buying as many tickets for Blazers games as I could. Seasons tickets and I were in completely different salary brackets, so I had to pick and choose. Matchups were a priority, of course. I got to see Olajuwon, Jordan, Ewing, David Robinson, Magic Johnson, and more. But I also remember hunting for wins. Frankly, they were pretty easy to come by.

This is something that modern Blazers fans probably don’t realize. When you’re at the top of the league, there are only two kinds of games on the schedule: victories and toss-ups. You win 90% of the victory games, half of the toss-ups, and you’ve got yourself a great record. Looking at that ‘91-’92 schedule, I remember thinking the Blazers had a legit chance to win 70 games. You could hardly find a difficult contest, let alone a down stretch.

Over the past few years, Portland’s schedule has been more like store-brand frozen pizza: tough no matter which way you slice it. It’s been the inverse of those Clyde Drexler years. You’re happy to see a toss-up game amid the sea of probable losses.

This year there’s a slight improvement. Portland might be able to pencil in some actual “W’s” against the Washington Wizards, New Orleans Pelicans, Utah Jazz, and Phoenix Suns. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s a step forward.

Still, most of the calendar looks like another lineup of losses. There are no easy months. Every time a stretch starts looking promising, up comes a murderer’s row, at least from Portland’s perspective. The first five months of the season forecast to about 3 “easy” wins per month, with the rest of the games leaving Portland at a probable disadvantage. The only question is whether it’s slight or overwhelming.

The gut feeling looking at this year’s schedule is that the Blazers aren’t out of the woods yet. So many thing can go wrong. The team can’t absorb or afford that. It’s probably going to be another season where we tout scrappiness, upcoming promise, and individual players over success.

The Blazers face the Minnesota Timberwolves, Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Clippers, Los Angeles Lakers, and Denver Nuggets in their first six games, with only the Utah Jazz as relief.

There are a couple bright spots, though.

The beginning of the season is pure Froot Loops for everybody. Teams are getting settled and used to each other. Nobody is locking in for playoffs races yet. Veteran teams are in shakedown cruise mode as much as anyone. If the Blazers have to face a nasty stretch, having it also be the most random month of the season is not a bad thing. Young legs and a devil-may-care approach probably serves as well in October as any time.

Second, Portland is resilient…or maybe more accurately, random. How they play in one month says almost nothing about how they’ll play in others. Few teams are more suited to shake off a down start, if it comes to that, than the Blazers are.

The flip side of that frontloaded schedule is March and April. During that month and a half, the Blazers draw seven completely winnable games and a couple of toss-ups. Nothing is guaranteed, but if Portland can hold their own early and develop momentum towards the playoffs, the schedule is set to let them finish the run. Fingers crossed that it’s not a moot point by then.

Living in the corner of the country, the Blazers will still pack on more travel miles than most teams this year. But they have only three extended road trips all season, each of five games’ duration. They are:

November 8th-16th at Miami, Orlando, New Orleans, Houston, and Dallas

February 26th-March 16th at Chicago, Charlotte, Atlanta, Memphis, and Houston

March 15th-March 22nd at Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Indiana, Minnesota, and Denver

I’m trying to remember the last time Portland didn’t have at least one 6- or 7-game road swing on the schedule.

The shadow side of this is that the Blazers do have stretches where those longer road trips are interrupted by only a couple home games, a product of the away games being distributed more widely in the schedule. Between November 8th and December 7th, Portland will play 12 of 16 games on the road. Between February 11th and March 22nd they’ll play 13 of 18 away. Those stretches could influence any potential playoffs run heavily.

January looks like a potentially good month for the Blazers with only 7 out of 15 games in the hard-to-win category. The barbed hook in that bait: it’s a back-to-back bonanza. The Blazers play in four back-to-back scenarios in January. Their other ten are distributed among the remaining five months of the year. Hopefully fatigue won’t turn otherwise-winnable games into difficult ones.

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