Changing Trail Blazers Leadership Brings New Challenges

The Portland Trail Blazers are embarking upon a brave new era as they approach the 2025-26 NBA season. Their roster has evolved. Formerly young players are starting to enter their primes. Familiar veterans have joined the roster. Blazers fans are as excited to see new draftee Yang Hansen take the floor as they have been for any rookie in years. Nothing is certain; many things are possible.

How new and brave is this step, though? We’ve come up with one way to frame it.

The career of a typical superstar hovers around 15 years of service. Some play more, others less, but a decade and a half is a good middle ground. Following that span, we’ve formulated a list of statistical leaders for the Blazers over the last 15 seasons, from 2010 until now.

We’ve filtered the list by a couple of standards. A player had to play 50 games or more in a season to qualify as a “leader” for our purposes. No half-seasons allowed. They also needed to hit the floor for an average of 15 minutes per game or more. Finally, their contributions in a stat category had to be significant. In other words, a player who attempted only five three-pointers all year wasn’t going to be listed as the three-point percentage leader even if they shot 80%.

Given those parameters, take a look at the statistical leaders for Portland between 2010 and now.

My first impression when looking at this chart is that time is weird. Hassan Whiteside, Allen Crabbe, and Ed Davis seem like ancient history now. They played not that long ago. The distance between Whiteside and today is the same as the distance between today and the season the Blazers will be finished inheriting the Milwaukee Bucks picks they got from the 2023 Damian Lillard trade.

My second impression is how thin the crust is atop the current team. Hardly any past leaders remain intact on the roster. Damian Lillard is back in name, at least, but nobody knows when he’s going to play again or how well. Jerami Grant still exists but he’s entered a slump that renders him a ghost of the player who led Portland in minutes played and three-point percentage between 2022 and 2024. After those two, only these players exist:

Portland’s leading scorer and rebounder from last season are gone, along with every leader from every season before save Grant.

No doubt players will step up into the void, eventually if not immediately. Still, it’s likely Blazers fans are underrating just what a seismic change this roster has undergone in the last three years. That story hasn’t stopped this season. The tempo increased. It’s possible the Blazers will need another season or two just to get used to each other and a new pecking order before we see them gel into the same kind of recognizable form they had between 2015-2023 or 2010-2015. And that’s if the players are right and everything goes well. If not, well, this leadership story might look the same next year and the season after as it does this one.