Portland Trail Blazers ‘Spinning Its Wheels’ In ‘Bizarre’ Rebuild

The Portland Trail Blazers were one of just four NBA teams who stood pat at last week’s NBA trade deadline. While Conor Bergin and I had some thoughts about it on last week’s podcast – including my rating the Blazers’ trade deadline as an ‘F’ – The Ringer’s Michael Pina has even sharper critique for the Blazers’ lack of activity. Let’s do a bit of call and response between Pina and my own observations:

Portland is 23-31, a spunky 13-seed that’s only 4.5 games back of the play-in. It’s also spinning its wheels, trudging through an increasingly paradoxical rebuild that can now, fairly, be categorized as bizarre. In the short term, Portland’s roster is tantalizing, explosive, and somewhat nonsensical. Its core players, several of whom are extension eligible this summer, may not be compatible with one another, and none are clear foundational centerpieces.

The most important part in here for me: “none are clear foundational centerpieces,” which all available history tells is not something Portland will ever resolve in free agency, and almost certainly won’t be resolved by trade, at least not now. That means through the draft lie the Blazers’ (nearly) only hope at long-term, sustainable success.

While veteran leadership can certainly bring value to a green team, there’s also something to be said about developing young players by, like, putting them on the court at the same time. Lineups that feature Shaedon Sharpe, Scoot Henderson, and Donovan Clingan—the team’s three most recent lottery picks—have played only 145 minutes this season, and they haven’t started a game together since November 20.

Back to that part about trades… let’s say they were interested in (weirdly) taking a swing for the next disgruntled big-name player. That means they need value to trade, which means developing their younger players to build that value… which Portland has not been doing. It’s also fair to speculate whether Billups isn’t coaching for his job here in Portland, but for his career as an NBA coach altogether. Absent organizational pressure to bench the veterans, we’ve seen unacceptable minutes splits where Jerami Grant can go 5 for 15 with four turnovers and play 38 minutes while Scoot Henderson goes 4 for 9 and only gets 26.

The Blazers have made it unnecessarily hard to figure out who should be part of the organization’s next growth cycle, a perplexing dilemma when you realize that all but four players on this roster are under contract next season, too. Yes, Portland will likely have another lottery pick in what’s expected to be a deep draft. But the strategy, right now, all feels a bit too circumspect.

Yes: clarity should be the name of the game, not for today, but for tomorrow, and finding that clarity is nearly impossible when you don’t allow your players to… you know…play. It also doesn’t help the future when Portland – even after two losses – is closer to 19th-best lottery odds than 5th-best.

There are a lot of questions, and I don’t have all the answers. But I really hope that the Blazers weren’t hoodwinked by their own recent success. That would be criminally shortsighted, regardless of how formidable they’ve looked over the past six weeks. Since January 1, the Thunder and Clippers are the only teams that rank higher in defensive rating, which might be the most unbelievable stat I’ve read all season.

While “backhanded compliment” may characterize this sentiment, there does need to be a moment of silence for the Blazers’ recent defensive rating, which has been pulled back toward the mean after losing by a combined 45 points in their last two outings. Do I think Joe Cronin got stars in his eyes over a hot stretch in January? No. But it almost makes it worse imagining that this could have been his preferred strategy all along.

The trade deadline can be an inflection point for any franchise mired in the wilderness of a prolonged rebuild. By sitting this one out, Portland tacked another level of uncertainty on top of a plan that’s yet to take shape.

No notes.