The Importance of Good Vibes

As contending teams crumble around them, the Blazers have already done the hard part.

I've been thinking for a few days about whether I even wanted to write about what's going on in Brooklyn with Kyrie Irving, and I've decided I don't really have much to say about him that everyone else hasn't already said. As soon as he started talking about the earth being flat and then saying he just said that to make people think, this was always where it was going to end up. The phrase "do your own research" never ends well.

The Nets are a disaster for plenty of other reasons than their anti-vaxxer star point guard sharing Alex Jones videos and links to films with antisemitic claims. They can't defend anyone; Ben Simmons is a shell of himself physically; Kevin Durant is back after a summer of demanding to either be traded or have the general manager and coach fired; and now, said coach has been fired and appears ready to be replaced by a coach currently facing a year-long suspension for an inappropriate relationship with an employee of the team he's currently employed by. Things are just going great all around.

The Nets are the biggest and most high-profile dumpster fire, but they're far from the only team thought before the season to have title aspirations that currently has terrible vibes.

The Sixers, coming off an offseason where they re-signed James Harden and ran back as much of his Rockets supporting cast as they could get their hands on, are off to a slow start that has head coach Doc Rivers openly questioning effort.

The Clippers are already holding Kawhi Leonard out of games for knee-injury management and Marcus Morris, somehow an important rotation player on a contending team in 2022, is saying they're relying too much on on-paper talent to think they'll be OK. They needed a vintage Paul George performance to squeak out a win against the Houston Elite on Monday night.

The Nuggets just became the first team this season to lose to the Lakers, after which head coach Michael Malone said their defense has yet to show up on the road. (We're not even going to bring up the Lakers here, because nobody who's looked at their roster actually expected them to be good.)

The Heat are old and slow. The Timberwolves, who made the biggest move of the entire offseason trading their next decade of draft picks for Rudy Gobert, haven't meshed and Karl-Anthony Towns is publicly questioning Anthony Edwards' diet in press conferences. Mavs coach Jason Kidd is already calling out their biggest offseason pickup, Christian Wood.

The teams I can confidently say I think are "good" right now are the Bucks, Celtics, Cavs, Raptors, Suns, Grizzlies and Pelicans. The Warriors will probably be fine despite their underwhelming start. After that, there's a whole lot of "we'll see," the 5-1 Blazers included. They look great at the moment, but this upcoming road trip could be a reality check.

What's been most surprising through the first two weeks of the regular season has been how good, both on the court and in vibes, a lot of the teams everyone assumed would be tanking have been. The Pacers have something with the Tyrese Haliburton-Bennedict Mathurin backcourt and played two competitive games against Brooklyn. The Spurs are 5-2 and appear completely unaffected by last week's out-of-nowhere bombshell that 2021 lottery pick Josh Primo was being waived and could be facing legal action for allegedly exposing himself to a team employee. The Thunder are (for now) actually letting Shai Gilgeous-Alexander play, and it turns out he's pretty good.

And the Jazz. The 6-2 Utah Jazz, who trail only Portland and Phoenix in the Western Conference as it stands right now. After Danny Ainge traded away two perennial All-Stars in Gobert and Donovan Mitchell for a boatload of draft picks, the Jazz appeared ready to engage in the most blatant tank job since the Process-era Sixers, or at least since the February-to-April Blazers of last season.

So far, they're reminding me of the 2015-16 Blazers, a team that was expected to be one of the worst in the league after losing four of five starters, including LaMarcus Aldridge and Nicolas Batum, in the offseason. Damian Lillard was too good for them to tank, and CJ McCollum had a breakout year, and they unexpectedly not only made the playoffs but won a series.

The Jazz probably won't stay that good. Ainge will trade away Mike Conley and Rudy Gay at some point before the deadline and force the issue when it comes to lottery balls. But maybe he won't. The longer I do this, the more I've come to believe that actually trying to win every night, lottery odds be damned, is the way to build a team and an organization. Losing by design builds bad habits, and bad habits lead to bad vibes.

The Blazers, at present, have phenomenal vibes, even with Lillard out for at least the next couple of games. They're defending, which they haven't done in years. They're running in transition, which they haven't done in years. Shaedon Sharpe mania is taking over in a way no rookie has gotten fans in Portland excited since 2008-09 Rudy Fernandez. I'm getting national podcast invites now, because the Blazers are the "it" team in the greater NBA-viewing community.

It's not long ago that they were at the opposite end of the spectrum. Almost exactly a year ago, on Nov. 5, 2021, I was driving home from the Moda Center after an unremarkable early-season win over Indiana, when I got this Twitter alert:

Even before that news broke, casting yet another cloud of uncertainty around the organization, the Blazers' vibes couldn't have been much worse. Putting aside the then-general manager's handling of the coaching hire that summer, the on-court product was lethargic and overdue to be changed up. The crowds were empty for reasons related to both COVID and other stuff.

Even after the needed organizational changes took place in December, the rest of the season was still a rough watch, minus a blip of optimism with a four-game winning streak around a trade deadline that saw new GM Joe Cronin trade away every veteran not named Lillard. The long-term plan was obvious and easy to understand; that didn't make the feeling in the building night-to-night any less miserable.

It's really wild how quickly things change from where they were a year ago to where they are now. The Blazers could come back from this upcoming road trip at .500 after starting the year 5-1, and I don't get the sense anyone in the building would be particularly worried. They've already done the hard part: fixing the vibes. Upgrading the talent comes later.

Even at their lowest last fall, the Blazers' vibes were never as far gone as they are in Brooklyn right now. That situation feels irreparable, but it was built on shaky ground from the beginning. It's going to take years to repair that, and it certainly won't be with any of the people involved right now.