MAILBAG: How Much Better Can Anfernee Simons Get?
Plus, questions about recent reporting on Deandre Ayton, letting Nickeil Alexander-Walker get away and the Trail Blazers' plans for the upcoming draft.
I did not go to All-Star Weekend this year.
There were a few reasons for it. Last year, Damian Lillard was in both the All-Star Game and the three-point contest, and Salt Lake City is an easy two-hour flight from Portland. It made sense to go, and I was glad I did. This year, all I had as someone who covers the Portland Trail Blazers was Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe in the Rising Stars game—and of those two, only Henderson was actually participating since Sharpe is recovering from surgery. I’m not flying to Indianapolis (where there are no direct flights from Portland) in February for that. If Sharpe was a) healthy, and b) doing the dunk contest, maybe that would have been a different story.
But I have a limited amount of funds for these sorts of trips, and in the immediate future, I have to use that money for two events that are much more important to the goal of giving you the best coverage of this team that you’ll find anywhere: the lottery and predraft combine in Chicago in May, and Summer League in Las Vegas in July.
I spent the weekend mostly unplugging. I only watched one of the three nights’ events—Saturday—but I saw all of the discourse about how broken All-Star Weekend is, and my overarching thought is: for as visibly annoyed as Adam Silver was in presenting the trophy to the Eastern Conference team that scored over 200 points, this is exactly what he wanted.
I still love the NBA and follow it religiously, but I’ve long been annoyed that Silver’s regime seems to view itself as more of a tech company than a sports league. I don’t even want to think about how much money the league spent on the LED court that was used for the Saturday night festivities, but that was something it felt like they did solely to generate social-media buzz about the court lighting up neon green during the three-point contest presented by rebranded Sierra Mist.
Silver and Victor Wembanyama excitedly showed off a demo of a new A.I. technology that allows you to ask your Alexa to show you the NBA game you’re watching animated like Spider-Man. Who is that for? Who was asking for it? What problem is that solving? How much money went into that, that could have gone to something more productive?
I’ve been to All-Star Weekend several times and still enjoy it for what it is: an industry convention and social-media event that you go to to be seen at. It’s above my pay grade to figure out how to make players care about the exhibition game more. I wish more stars would do the dunk contest, and it wouldn’t be a bad thing if the game was better, but to me, it’s very low down on the list of long-term issues the league needs to address.
Silver has spent the last decade wanting the NBA to be the Instagram league, and an All-Star game that everybody hates where nobody tries, where the star of the weekend is a court that lights up different colors, is the end result of that. Worry about keeping the main thing the main thing (in this case, the games, which are still quite good for the most part) and the rest of the NBA’s problems will solve themselves.
Anyway, I also spent the break diving into your mailbag questions, which spanned a variety of topics. What is Anfernee Simons’ ceiling? How much weight should you put into a recent report about Deandre Ayton’s early Blazers tenure? Why didn’t they keep Nickeil Alexander-Walker at the 2022 trade deadline? Are they really going to use four draft picks this year? Find out below.
How much more growth do you think there is for Anfernee Simons? Do you think he is a building block, future all-star, or do you see him in the Tyler Herro vein (who is actually younger than him).
If it's the latter when do you think realistically the team starts looking to move him? I also have to imagine they will want to see Shaedon back first to make sure he is a guy before making that decision.
- Burricane
There are two different questions here, and I’ll try to tackle both of them as best I can.
As for how much better there still is for Simons to get, the answer is a lot. He’s still only 24 and in just his second season of being a full-time starter. The high end of his production is All-Star-level; doing that consistently is the thing that needs to improve if he’s going to get there. Part of that is he’s still figuring out his role in a post-Damian Lillard world. When he’s the point guard, he’s now the one getting the defensive attention Lillard got, and as you’d imagine, it’s a process learning to navigate that. When he’s played off the ball with Scoot Henderson, that’s a very different kind of point guard than Lillard was. I think it’s too early to say what Simons’ ceiling is, but I do think it’s reasonable to predict—as I did when he re-signed last summer—that he’ll ultimately outperform the four-year, $100 million contract he’s on.
I don’t think Joe Cronin is close to thinking about moving Simons, unless it’s in the absolute perfect deal that brings back a legitimate high-end starter under 25 that better complements Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe. I figure they probably have another year before they have to really make that decision. Next offseason, Simons will be going into the final year of his contract and Sharpe will be eligible for a rookie-scale extension. They need to have some things figured out by then in one direction or the other.
After the three point flamethrower from Nickeil Alexander-Walker in the first Wolves game, I started thinking about why we traded him. We had NAW on our team for a hot minute. But let him go for hobbled Joe Ingles, Elijah Hughes and a second round pick. I remember being confused then and I’m still confused now by the transaction. Any insight into the thinking of the FO at that time?
- Josh B.
On its own, that’s probably one they’d like to have back. It’s never a good feeling for an organization when they don’t keep a guy and he breaks out somewhere else. When I was on the Bulls beat, they waived Spencer Dinwiddie from their training-camp roster to sign R.J. Hunter, who played a total of nine (9) minutes for them; Dinwiddie caught on in Brooklyn and has had a pretty solid career since.
Alexander-Walker came over from New Orleans as a throw-in in the C.J. McCollum trade where the main prizes were Josh Hart and a future pick. The trade the next day to send him to Utah brought back Joe Ingles (who, as you said, was coming off a torn ACL and never played a game in Portland), tanking All-Star Elijah Hughes and a second-round pick.
That’s a minor enough deal that if the Blazers had felt strongly enough about Alexander-Walker, they probably could have kept him and used a different salary to move money around. In retrospect, it was a miss in their evaluation.
But in fairness, two things to note. Alexander-Walker didn’t set the world on fire in Utah, either, and didn’t break out until he got to Minnesota a year later, again as a throw-in in the three-team trade that sent D’Angelo Russell to the Lakers and Mike Conley to the Timberwolves. And the second-round pick Portland got back from Utah in the original deal was used that year to draft Jabari Walker.
You win some, you lose some when it comes to this stuff.
What do you make of Jason Quick's reporting of professionalism issues from Ayton? We know there were challenges in PHX. Have you heard anything that would lend weight or discredit Jason's reporting?
- Mike W.
I can’t speak to anyone else’s reporting specifically, but I can do my best to unpack how the Deandre Ayton experience in Portland has been so far, good and bad.
It hasn’t been perfect. On the court, it’s been up-and-down. Rough early, better lately. Not a coincidence that as he’s gotten to play with Simons and Henderson for more extended periods of time in recent weeks while they’ve all been healthy, Chauncey Billups has started to get more of a handle on how best to use him, and the results are improving.
I think some of the personality stuff has been mischaracterized, and a lot of that is driven by that practice media scrum that went viral during the preseason when he shut down questions about playing against the Suns for the first time. My antennas went up when that happened, because I didn’t know him that well at that point and I’d heard the same stuff everyone else had heard about his time in Phoenix went.
But in my experience, that type of interaction has been more the exception than the norm. On a personal level, I like Ayton quite a bit and I haven’t seen anything that would make me think his teammates feel differently. He’s a goofy guy and usually singing or joking around with someone when I see him in the locker room. I’ve only had a couple of one-on-one conversations with him but I’ve enjoyed those. I generally find him affable and fun to talk to.
He’s actually not too dissimilar in personality to Jusuf Nurkic, in a way. Both can be moody at times when things aren’t going well, but both at their core are good guys. If there have been times when someone on the coaching staff has had it out with Ayton over something in a practice, it’s all pretty standard stuff that happens over the course of an NBA season, from my understanding. Just like the ice-storm debacle, this kind of stuff gets talked about a certain way because Ayton is who he is, and is an easy target, and wouldn’t get talked about that way if it was anybody else.
If I understand it correctly, the Blazers have 4 picks in the upcoming draft (2 first-rounders and 2 second-rounders). What's the likelihood of the team drafting 4 players?
- Victor T.
You are correct—as of right now, the Blazers are slated to have two picks in each round:
Their own lottery pick.
Golden State’s first-rounder, unless the Warriors move up into the top four of the lottery, in which case the pick becomes top-1 protected in 2025 and unprotected in 2026.
Charlotte’s second-rounder, which is likely to be No. 34 overall.
Atlanta’s second-rounder, which will probably land somewhere in the late 30s or early 40s.
I would say it’s extremely unlikely they use all four picks. Right now, they have six rookies, all of whom they like and want to keep. Even in a rebuild, you can only have so many young guys if you want to be able to actually play all of them. Oklahoma City and Memphis have run into this problem in the last couple of years. As it is, Portland may not be able to keep all three of Kris Murray, Toumani Camara and Jabari Walker long-term because they all need minutes and eventually, you have to decide who to pay. Adding four more new draft picks into the mix and investing equally in their development makes that even tougher.
I would expect them to use their own pick, which is all but locked into the fifth-highest lottery odds, the same place they were last year, when they moved up to No. 3. If the pick lands in the top four, they’re in great shape. If it’s not, I could see a scenario where they try to package their own pick and the Warriors’ pick to move up a few spots. With how divided teams are on the top of this draft, it’s possible that one of the teams ahead of them doesn’t love any of the top three or four players and would be open to trading back. So that could be an option.
If they keep their second-rounders, at most one of them will probably be used on a player that will be on the team next season. Maybe they trade the other one away, or use one or both to draft-and-stash international players who won’t come over right away.
As it stands right now, after signing Duop Reath to a multi-year deal last week, the Blazers have 13 out of 15 roster spots spoken for next season with only Moses Brown coming off the books and Dalano Banton having a team option I’d expect them to decline. (Camara and Walker both have partial guarantees, but I can’t imagine either of them isn’t picked up). In order to make any kind of additions, they’re going to have to trade some players away just to make the math work.
It’s too early to know who that might be and what it might look like. But bringing in four new rookies is not practical at all, and the front office knows that.