Portland Trail Blazers Scoot Henderson one of Lowe’s ‘Most Intriguing’

On the Zach Lowe Show, Lowe and longtime frequent guest Howard Beck discussed Portland Trail Blazers guard Scoot Henderson as one of their “Most Intriguing Players” for the upcoming 2025-26 season (time stamped to 32:56):

Lowe: It’s a must pick. If there’s a player that has to be in this exercise, it’s Scoot Henderson.

Beck: I have no emotional investment in the outcome of games or in anybody’s careers. But that said, we do get to know people, right? And there are people that you like. And I got to do one of the first real in-depth profiles of Scoot when I was at Sports Illustrated a few years ago. And I went down and I visited him and his family in suburban Atlanta, suburban Marietta, and it was a wonderful, wonderful family… I just I like Scoot Henderson as a person… I spent a lot of time around him and the family, and you could see he had an NBA player’s body as a 16-, 17-year old in high school. He just looked like he was made for the NBA at that moment. And the three-point shot in the gym looked phenomenal.

If nothing else, for the next couple of years, Scoot is going to have – assuming nothing changes – the greatest mentorship in the world. Chauncey Billups, Hall of Fame point guard. Dame Lillard, Hall of Fame point guard. Jrue Holiday, I don’t know how to judge whether he’ll ever be in the Hall of Fame, but championship, just great ‘guard’ guard. Smart, thoughtful people who really understand the game and his position at the most granular level. He could not possibly have a better NBA education at this stage.

They then discuss what they’ve seen in his progression so far, and what Henderson would have to show to become a legit threat at the NBA level:

Lowe: Look, we all know it’s about the shooting, right? That there’s only so far you can get as a lead ball handler if players are going to play ten feet off you and duck under every screen and wall off the paint and not have to rotate from anywhere [from] any of the shooters on the floor. The shooting trended in the right direction across the board last year. It’s not just the threes going up to 35%. It’s going from 46% at the rim, which is ghastly, to 56% at the rim. Mid-range jumpers up, you know, about the same, but like the shooting trended the right way. It’s not good enough. It’s not nearly good enough yet.

Now, there are some times where he’s so physical and so fast that it doesn’t matter. You can go under a screen for him and he’s going to beat you to the other side of it and attack the basket. There are sometimes where the Blazers know that teams are going to go under screens for him and so they kind of trick the defense into not being able to do that. They run a decoy action and then get it to Scoot. They set the screen two, three, four times until you’re stuck. And all of the sudden he’s in an advantageous position.

Henderson averaged 12.7 points last year, fewer than the year before, but pulled his effective field goal percentage from 44% his rookie season to 49.6% last year.