In the midst of a chaotic June and July for the Trail Blazers, I started thinking about how I'd fill the final six weeks of the offseason, between last week's release of the 2025-26 regular-season schedule and the start of training camp on Sept. 29.
With this being the year 2025, a lot of outlets are using the dead part of the summer to roll out lists of the top 25 _____ of the last 25 years. I'm not at all above stealing a good idea, especially when so many places have done it that I'm not ripping off anyone specific, so that's what I'm doing.
The obvious way to make a list would be to simply count down the top 25 Blazers players of the last 25 years, but that isn't very interesting to me. Yes, Damian Lillard is No. 1. What do I have to say about it that's new? Not much.
That's why what I'm doing instead is counting down the top 25 individual performances by Blazers players since 2000. This way, I'll get to talk about not just the obvious names like Lillard, LaMarcus Aldridge and C.J. McCollum, but some outlier performances by cult favorites that are fun to revisit and aren't talked about as much. (Here's a tease: Nik Stauskas may or may not make an appearance.)
I set an important rule for the exercise: limiting it to one game per player. So I will only be including one Lillard game, one Rasheed Wallace game, one Brandon Roy game, etc. It's not very interesting to have a handful of players dominate the list, and it makes it more fun and challenging to have to identify the one game from Lillard or Aldridge that's better than all the others.
I didn't have a set criteria for making the list. Some were obvious—I suspect for most of you, there won't be any surprises in the top five. For the lower ones, it's much more subjective and vibes-based. Some of them I just included because I wanted to write about them. There's no science to it.
A few honorable mentions:
I really wanted to find a way to include Rudy Fernandez, but there isn't any one game from his three years in Portland that I could justify putting on ahead of the ones I picked.
Similarly, it doesn't feel right that Arvydas Sabonis is left off the list, since he did play two seasons for the Blazers this century. But his best years in the NBA came in the 1990s, and even those weren't close to what he was in Europe back in the day. Whenever I'm asked which Blazers what-if I'd most want to see play out, I always zag from the obvious Bill Walton/Brandon Roy/Greg Oden injury answers and say I'd like to see what would have happened if an in-his-prime Sabonis had been able to come over to the NBA to play with Clyde Drexler and Terry Porter during their run in the late '80s and early '90s.
Steve Blake's 14 assists in the first quarter against the Clippers on Feb. 22, 2009 remains an NBA record, and I thought about including that game for that reason, but in the end there were too many others I needed to put in. I still want to mention it.
I ended up going with a different Jusuf Nurkic game for the list, but a close second to the one I picked is his 33-point, 15-rebound performance against Denver near the end of the 2016-17 season, after which he wished his former team a "happy summer." That was the peak of Nurk Fever.
The first entries will be out later this week for paid subscribers, on Wednesday (#25-23) and Friday (#22-21). From there, they'll run Monday-Wednesday-Friday every week for the rest of the offseason, concluding with No. 1 on Sept. 26, the last Friday before the start of training camp the following Monday.
