How Will the Trail Blazers Navigate Offseason Roster Crunch?
General manager Joe Cronin has his work cut out for him this summer.
Going into this offseason, the Trail Blazers’ roster is three things you don’t want to be: expensive, lacking in flexibility to add new pieces, and not set up to win a lot of games.
Sean Highkin
The last of those three is going to continue next season, because the Blazers want another high lottery pick. It’s general manager Joe Cronin’s job to solve the other two, and he’s going to have his work cut out for him.
Portland’s tight financial picture
As it sits right now, the Blazers have 14 players under contract for next season if they keep everyone. They have a $2.2 million team option on Dalano Banton for next season that, if they pick it up, becomes a partial guarantee. When he came over from Boston at the deadline, Banton was seen as a low-risk flier and not necessarily a part of the future plans. But he likely played himself into having that option picked up once he got here.
Jabari Walker and Toumani Camara both have partial guarantees, but there’s almost no way either of them don’t get picked up—they’re on extremely cheap second-round pick contracts and both are good players that the organization has made significant investment in developing.
Here are the salaries everyone under contract next season is set to make, if they bring everybody back:
- Deandre Ayton: $34 million
- Jerami Grant: $29.8 million
- Anfernee Simons: $25.9 million
- Malcolm Brogdon: $22.5 million
- Robert Williams III: $12.4 million
- Matisse Thybulle: $11 million
- Scoot Henderson: $10.2 million
- Shaedon Sharpe: $6.6 million
- Kris Murray: $2.9 million
- Dalano Banton: $2.2 million
- Duop Reath: $2 million
- Jabari Walker: $2 million
- Toumani Camara: $1.8 million
- Rayan Rupert: $1.8 million
That’s before factoring in the salaries of their coming draft picks. The Blazers are currently slated to have two picks in the first round: their own and Golden State’s. We won’t know exactly where those picks land until after May 12’s draft lottery in Chicago, but for the sake of this exercise, let’s assume that the Warriors don’t jump into the top four (in which case they’d keep their pick and Portland gets it next year) and that the Blazers’ own lottery pick doesn’t move up or down and stays at No. 4 overall (they tied with Charlotte for the third-worst record but lost the tiebreaker with the Hornets for lottery position). The fourth pick comes with a first-year salary of $7.6 million. The Warriors’ pick, currently slated to be No. 14 overall, has a starting salary of $3.7 million.
The Blazers literally cannot use both of their first-round picks without clearing a roster spot before the start of the season. They’re allowed to have up to 21 players under contract through the offseason and training camp, so this isn’t a problem in the summer, but by October, it will be.
If they keep everyone and use both of those picks, they’ll have 16 players under contract at $178.4 million in total salary for a roster that will be over the legal limit for opening night.
The actual numbers for next year’s salary cap and luxury tax won’t be finalized until closer to July 1, when the new league year begins. But the latest projections the NBA shared with teams in January put the cap at $141 million and the tax line at $172 million, with the first apron at $179 million and the second apron at $190 million.
If those projections hold, the Blazers would enter the offseason well into the luxury tax and less than $1 million below the first apron, for a roster that (obviously) isn’t anywhere close to contending for the play-in, much less the playoffs.
So, there need to be some changes somewhere. Not just in the sense of, “It’s probably not a good idea to run back an expensive lottery team.” Quite literally, something has to change.
What that is could be a number of different things. There are logjams both in the backcourt and on the wing, with a few choices to make between different players. Cronin has several short- and long-term questions to answer over the next six months.
The guard dilemma
Long-term, the Blazers will have to pick two out of Scoot Henderson, Shaedon Sharpe and Anfernee Simons to build around.
They don’t have to make that decision until next summer, when Sharpe becomes eligible for a rookie-scale extension and Simons is entering the final year of the four-year, $100 million contract he signed in 2022.
The three guards barely got to play together this year due to injuries, so there’s still sense in seeing how it works for an extended period of time. But long-term, keeping all three of them isn’t going to work. Simons is learning how to play point guard but has to play off-ball with Henderson until Henderson’s shooting gets more consistent. Sharpe is more of a shooting guard than a small forward. The fit between the three of them isn’t the cleanest.
Because of Simons’ contract situation and how early the Blazers are in their rebuild, he makes the most sense out of the three to test the market for, but he’s also currently the best player and most known quantity out of the three. Henderson’s final stretch of his rookie season was encouraging and Sharpe continued to show star potential before his season ended in January with a core muscle injury that eventually required surgery. Are they sure enough about either one to feel comfortable moving on from Simons before they have to decide whether or not to give him another big contract? That’s something Cronin will have to figure out, with limited data.
Simons is set to make $25.9 million next year (his age-25 season) and $27.7 million in 2025-26. He’s in a similar position to the one the Bulls and Zach LaVine were in when they matched Sacramento’s four-year, $78 million offer sheet in 2018. LaVine outperformed that contract and set himself up for a massive raise on his next deal which he got from Chicago in 2022. The contract Simons is on now is great value for his age and production. In two years, they’ll have to decide if they want to give him a significant bump up, which will only make sense to do if they’re close enough to getting back into playoff contention to be worth committing that much money to him.
Simons said at his exit interview last week that he wants an opportunity to win and didn’t enjoy losing as many games as the Blazers did this season. He isn’t the type to “demand” a trade, and he isn’t a big enough star where he could apply that much leverage even if he did. But what he said his short-term goals are doesn’t line up with what the team’s reality is going to be in the next year or two.
They don’t need to move Simons now, but they shouldn’t be closed off to the idea if the right deal is there.
Solving the logjam among the young forwards
None of the Blazers’ first- and second-year wings are ever going to be the face of the franchise the way they hope Sharpe or Henderson might one day be. But with Toumani Camara, Kris Murray and Jabari Walker, they have a similar logjam of three talented young forwards battling for the same minutes and, eventually, the same money when their cheap rookie contracts are up.
“This is kind of a convoluted group, in a good way,” Cronin said at his end-of-season press conference last week when he was asked about Walker, Camara and Murray. “It's one of the big positives of how this season played out. … But at the same time, we've got to figure out who's playing and who isn't. They've all got a lot to prove. Each of those guys have some deficiencies that they have to address this offseason.”
If I had to handicap it, I think Camara is the most solidified out of the three, having started for more than half of his rookie season. His offense still needs to develop, but his defense might get him a spot on one of the All-Rookie teams that should be announced in the next few weeks. Walker is the best rebounder out of them and a solid smallball center and energy bench big; Murray probably has the highest offensive upside out of the three but didn’t start showing that consistently until the second half of the year.
There are no easy answers as to which one of them will or should be the odd man out. It’s going to be a big summer for all three of them, and if a team asks about one of them as part of a bigger deal for a higher-end contributor, it might be a decision Cronin has to make sooner than he’d like.
How many draft picks will they use?
The Blazers currently hold four picks in this year’s draft: their own first-rounder as well as Golden State’s (the latter is top-4 protected), and second-rounders from Charlotte (either 33rd or 34th, to be determined after the lottery) and Atlanta (No. 40 overall).
It would be very difficult and impractical for them to use all four of those picks and bring in four rookies next season, both because of the limited roster spots and how crowded it would get. This year, they had a near-unprecedented amount of rookies who were actual rotation players and are long-term pieces, to the point that they became just the second team in modern NBA history to start an all-rookie starting five. All five of those rookies—Henderson, Camara, Murray, Rupert and Reath—are players the Blazers view as being part of their rebuild going forward.
Adding four more rookies to that mix, who will need the same runway to develop, is just too unwieldy. You quickly get into the territory of Memphis and Oklahoma City over the past few years, who have had to give away good players they developed like De’Anthony Melton, Tre Mann and Vasilije Micić, because they didn’t have enough roster spots for them.
The only one of their picks you can be certain Portland will use is their own, which has a 13.2 percent chance of being No. 1 overall and can’t fall any lower than eighth depending on how the lottery shakes out next month. Even in a draft that most analysts consider one of the weakest talent classes in at least a decade, having a pick that high gives them a chance to land another high-level prospect. And however you feel about the overall performance of the Cronin-era front office regime over the past two and a half years, their track record of finding talent in the draft is pretty undeniable thus far.
The Warriors’ pick is one they could either use or package with one of their veterans (like Brogdon) if that’s what it takes to land the type of young player they’re targeting to be part of the rebuild.
If they keep either of their second-rounders, don’t be surprised if they use one of them to draft someone they plan to sign on a two-way contract (thus not taking up one of their roster spots) or an international player in a draft-and-stash. As much as they’d like to use all four picks and feel confident in their ability to hit all of them, it doesn’t make any practical sense to do it
Who are the most likely trade candidates?
The Blazers received numerous calls about Malcolm Brogdon from contending teams before the trade deadline but opted to keep him. That made sense at the time—the offers they had in February were mostly centered around more 2024 draft picks they didn’t want or need, and they didn’t find any of them more valuable than what Brogdon provided in the locker room.
Now, Brogdon is going into the final year of his contract (making a very manageable $22.5 million) and, with the amount of playing time their younger guards will need next season, makes no sense to keep. Comparable offers to the ones they got at the deadline will be there in the summer, and the timing is right for both sides to move on.
During the season, Portland had no interest in moving their other high-priced veteran, Jerami Grant, whose name was often mentioned before the deadline as a trade candidate for contenders to pursue.
This summer, I could see it going either way. He still has four years left on the five-year, $160 million contract he signed last summer, so there’s no urgency to trade him like there is with Brogdon. If they get an offer that makes sense, they shouldn’t be as resistant to it as they were at the deadline. It will be easier to assess his value and place on the roster after the lottery shakes out and the Blazers know who they might be looking at in the draft.
The Blazers got some calls about Robert Williams III, but his value while he was out for the season with a knee injury was too low for anything to make sense. If teams get word that his rehab is going well and he’ll be ready to go for next season, there might be a stronger market, but that remains to be seen.
Matisse Thybulle is the other name to watch here. The Blazers love him and he loves Portland, but he’s far from untouchable, and his salary and defensive impact make him someone playoff teams might want to trade for.
Cronin said at his exit interview that his roster-building strategy this summer will be “a similar approach that we took to the trade deadline.” I would take that to mean he’s more interested in getting back players than picks, provided those players fit with the way he’s trying to build the roster. Maybe his lack of interest in trades built around draft capital at the deadline had more to do with this year’s draft, in which the Blazers already have two lottery picks, being seeing as a weaker class. You’re not going to see very many, if any, 2025 first-rounders be traded in the next year, because the entire league views that draft as one of the most loaded in years. But picks in future years could be on the table in some offers, and that’s something they should consider.
Two-way decisions
In their first season with their own G League team, the Blazers made good use of their three two-way spots. Two players, Skylar Mays (later waived) and Duop Reath, got their two-way deals converted to standard contracts. Ibou Badji and Justin Minaya got consistent run with the Remix that contributed to their readiness to play when called upon with the big club. And the organization was also able to reward one of the standout players from the Remix, Ashton Hagans, by signing him to a two-way as an emergency point guard after the All-Star break.
They ended the season with Badji, Minaya and Hagans on two-way deals. Of the three, the most likely to be back on another two-way next year is Badji. He’s still a ways away from being ready for full-time NBA rotation minutes, but the Blazers love him. He’s one of Mike Schmitz’s prized scouting discoveries and has improved significantly from last year at Summer League to now. He probably needs one more year of development in the G League, which is what two-way contracts are for. It would be somewhat shocking if he’s not back, and another year on a two-way makes the most sense.
Hagans and Minaya could be back—both had some good moments when they played and the organization likes them—but the Blazers’ long-term investment in them as prospects isn’t nearly as strong as it is in Badji. The Remix hold both of their returning-player rights for the G League, so if they don’t get picked up by another NBA team before training camp or sign overseas, they could very well stay in Portland in one capacity of another.
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