How Do the Trail Blazers Stack Up With the NBA's Other Rebuilding Teams?
Taking stock of the rest of the league's race to the bottom.
The standings don’t reflect it anymore, but the Trail Blazers are still in a rebuild.
Coming out of the All-Star break, after losing last Thursday to the Lakers, the Blazers have won two straight, over two fellow rebuilding teams in the Charlotte Hornets and Utah Jazz. The next two games of their seven-game road trip, tonight and on Friday, are against two more of those teams: the Washington Wizards and Brooklyn Nets.
The Blazers are one of six teams in the NBA this season that can definitively be called “rebuilding teams,” along with the Nets, Jazz, Hornets, Wizards and Toronto Raptors. New Orleans and Philadelphia are down there with those teams record-wise, but the Pelicans and Sixers both entered the year intending to compete for the playoffs and had their season go off the rails due to injuries. Detroit, the worst team in the NBA each of the past two seasons, has graduated from the depths of rebuilding status and are currently a top-six team in the east. So for our purposes, we’re keeping it to those six teams that entered the season intending to lose a lot and are currently doing so.
With Portland in the middle of this stretch of playing those teams, it’s a good time to look at how they stack up, both now and in the future.
I boiled each of these six rebuilds down to six central questions:
How long has the rebuild been happening?
Have they found a foundational star yet?
Is there other young talent worth getting excited about?
Do they have a head coach that will be there long-term?
What’s their cap situation? Do they have a lot of money on the books for a lot of years?
Do they have a lot of future draft picks to work with, either in trades or in accumulating talent?
Which of these teams’ rebuilds you think is in the best shape going forward depends on what you value. But here’s how they compare: