The question “Why is this basketball team bad?” can make for some very complicated answers. Mismatched or redundant personnel, poor coaching, crummy work environment, archaic tactical makeup, “Bad Vibes”… all these things require lengthy explanations, but are still real, terrible reasons why your team can be sinking into the ocean.
What a blessing for an author, as well as a team, that the Portland Trail Blazers, sitting on a 13-25 record and a whopping -8.3 Net Rating*, the 28th worst in the league this year, are not afflicted by these soft problems. No, the Blazers just don’t have enough good players. This is an uncommon problem for the team in their history, which has been, 54 or so seasons in, pretty good on the whole. The past bad versions of the Blazers were cursed by lengthy stretches of mediocrity, 30-year-old fringe all-stars stinking up the joint, charismatic guards lording over sadder and sadder fiefdoms. To just be “a team full of guys who aren’t good while their co-workers are too young to contribute,” that’s a new thing.
Can the Blazers get enough good players to turn this around, make the playoffs, and inspire a weary nation? No. They cannot. Halfway through the season, it’s apparent that if you want to see the Blazers win games on the regular, you’re going to have to wait. I know that’s really sad, especially if you live an unexamined life, rooting through the dirt looking for every corn niblet of pleasure you can get from this life.
But if you want to stand over the maddening whole, hunting for some sign of a future where the Blazers stomp the shit out of their enemies? Buddy, have I got the team for you. Some parts of this experience are impossible: it’s safe to say that Anfernee Simons and Deandre Ayton—the team’s inefficient offensive engines and two of the worst defensive players in the NBA—will never have any place on a decent Blazers squad. But if you squint at some of these sub-25 guys, you can maybe see the outline of a man who will succeed in the NBA. The team managed to snag Deni Avdija this offseason, and he has been a professional, skilled wing player off the bench. Toumani Camara is raw, but has a certain defensive intensity the team has been lacking for years. Shaedon Sharpe is 21-years-old and already the team’s second leading scorer, a talent who could round into something special.
But, really, the only player you can still attach wild dreams to is Scoot.
Scoot Henderson, the number three pick last season, had a terrible rookie season after entering the draft as a scorching hot commodity. On the aggregate, his second season has not been THAT much better but… look at that game winner, man. Foot control, cool pivot, weird creative attempt… doesn’t that moment make you FEEL something? Doesn’t it make you WONDER and DREAM and HOPE that there is something in this young man’s heart, waiting for the key to unlock “The Next Great Blazer Superstar?”
Is this hope bullshit? Maybe? Probably. Most players amount to very little in the NBA and Henderson hasn’t really done much to warrant serious hype, aside from being athletic and flashing some real skill here and there, especially as a ball handler. But the Blazers REALLY need a guy to break out if they’re going to significantly improve any time in the next five years and Scoot is the only guy who still feels unknown in the way a draft pick feels unknown—a vague quantity who SEEMS like he could be great.
An example of the kind of thinking Scoot generates from Blazer watchers: Chauncey Billups, the Blazers’ coach who went straight from a TV job onto the sidelines with no relevant coaching experience and has proceeded to lord over two miserable seasons, was recently out of town for two games. Scoot played well in both games and hit that game winner in one. A raw mind, observing this without the guard rails of “a baseline understanding of the role of chance in the formation of the universe’s events,” immediately prescribes a full story: Chauncey is holding Scoot back, and he needs to get thrown on the next bus out of town if Henderson is ever going to unlock his full potential and save this team from the gutter they’ve tumbled into. This was the main current of thought one saw on the internet after Henderson hit that game winner. Of course none of this is sober, prescriptive, rational: Scoot might have had good games for some other reason or no reason at all.
But this line of thinking exposes a deeper, nervy truth about the team part way through this season: nothing the team is doing appears to be working. Scoot’s game isn’t coming into focus, the vets are really stinking up the joint and dismantling their own trade value, player development is going slower than you want. This year is lost: it was lost before the first tip back in October. The roster wasn’t made to win and that’s just how it is sometimes. But the future is always on the horizon and good cultivation in this time can make the transition back to relevance easier. Only time can tell if the Blazers are doing that, but currently? It really doesn’t feel like it.
*Net rating is a measurement of a team’s “true” performance. You calculate it by taking a team’s offensive rating (total points scored, divided by possessions played) and subtracting their defensive rating (total points scored divided by possessions played). This nifty bit of math gives you a sense of a team’s true offensive and defensive performance by sorting out the noise that pace of play creates.