MAILBAG: Is Deandre Ayton the Trail Blazers' Center of the Future?
Plus questions on ownership, Portland's WNBA bid and Mike Schmitz's impact on the front office.
So, how about that ending?
Returning to Oklahoma City, the site of the 62-point embarrassment, less than two weeks after the fact, the Trail Blazers almost got their best win of the season on the road against a genuine contender.
And then Malcolm Brogdon and Chauncey Billups both tried to call a timeout when Brogdon was trapped by two defenders at midcourt, the referees somehow missed it, Brogdon was called for a double-dribble and Billups was given two quick technicals and ejected.
It took me watching it a few times to see what actually happened, but it’s pretty hard to miss the attempts by both Brogdon and Billups to call timeout.
Crew chief Bill Kennedy conducted an interview with a pool reporter and said that Billups got the two technicals for making contact with the official, and that they missed Billups’ and Brogdon’s attempts to call timeout because they were focused on the play.
The Blazers are filing a protest with the league office to challenge the result of the game, a league source confirmed (ESPN first reported that they were protesting it). Only eight protests in the history of the NBA have been upheld, with the most recent coming in 2008, when the Miami Heat were granted a redo of the end of a game against the Atlanta Hawks when it was determined that Shaquille O’Neal was incorrectly fouled out when he really only had five fouls.
It’s extremely unlikely that the Blazers will be granted their protest in this case. If they are, they could potentially replay the end of Tuesday night’s game before the fourth and final meeting between the Blazers and Thunder this season, on March 6 in Portland. Filing the protest is more about formally registering their displeasure with the officiating — an ongoing issue around the league this season — than it is with expecting anything to come of it.
Now that they’ve filed the protest, they have five days to provide the NBA with evidence to support their case, and then the league has five more days to make a ruling one way or another. We will continue to track this story.
Anyway, here’s part two of this week’s mailbag.
Do you think Ayton is still the center of the future or do you think it's possible we see him in another uniform in the next few seasons? I think it's fair to say his play has been underwhelming (not all his fault) and with his huge contract it may not be very tantalizing for other teams.
- Kegan S.
For the foreseeable future, he is. You hit the nail on the head: Ayton is making north of $30 million per year for the next two years after this one and if he was playing well enough to have real trade value, they wouldn't be interested in trading him. Not that I've heard that they are—I haven't really heard much chatter on him in one direction or the other.
It's the same situation they were in with Jusuf Nurkic: For all his flaws, who can you realistically get that's better? In the case of Nurkic, the answer was Ayton, and I still think that trade was an upgrade at the center position. Robert Williams III's health will be a concern for the rest of his career, as it has been since he came into the league, so you can't count on him being a long-term piece. Duop Reath and Ibou Badji are good backups but not starters on a playoff team.
That's where they find themselves with Ayton: he's good enough that you can't just replace him easily, but not enough that you'd be able to trade him as part of a package for a big upgrade. So for now, he's the guy.
You’re my go to sports writer for the Blazers. My question isn’t necessarily Blazer related or NBA. But I was wondering if you have heard anything if there is any noise about salvaging Portland’s WNBA bid?
- Jason M.
I don't think it's a completely dead issue, although Kirk Brown pulling out of the bid at the 11th hour didn't help matters. I don't know much more than that right now but it's something I'm continuing to monitor.
Sean, you recently did a great story on the success so far of the Rip City Remix in terms of development for young players. It was good to hear from the front office and the coaches that they're already seeing a positive yield. I'm curious, is the organization feeling like it's been a success from the business side as well? Launching the franchise from scratch in such a short amount of time was impressive but I would be curious to know if the organization is feeling high or low in regards to attendance, merchandise, general fan enjoyment, etc compared to the expectations they had going into the launch.
- Jesse B.
From the people on that side of things that I’ve talked to, I think they’re happy with where sales are considering it’s year one and they had such a tight turnaround to launch. In most cases in any sport, a new franchise has 18 months of lead time (or more) from being announced to playing their first game, so the business side has a lot more time to build awareness and figure out a rollout for a marketing campaign. The Remix had a fraction of that to launch. So while their attendance isn’t where they want it to be long-term, they had realistic expectations for the first year going in and they’re at least meeting those.
The merchandise, from what I can tell, has been a massive success. I can’t remember a team ever announcing a new name or logo and it being met with a 100 percent approval rating—I have yet encounter a single person who doesn’t think the logo is great. And that part is only going to get better, too. The jerseys the team has been wearing are just placeholders because they didn’t have time to get their actual jerseys approved, so there’s going to be something a lot more creative unveiled next year and beyond.
Many fans including me want the team to have a new owner. However, do you seriously think someone new would have a positive impact on the product on the court?
- kuhnsmith
Maybe, maybe not. I’ve long felt—and written—that Blazers fans jumping to “Jody Allen needs to sell the team” is a little reductive, and even more so when people act like it’s a sure thing that Phil Knight would be some kind of savior.
Long-term, the franchise does need new ownership that isn’t a trust, and that’s going to happen at some point because Paul Allen’s trust states that all of his assets have to be sold eventually. But from everything I can tell, things have been pretty status-quo under Vulcan leadership since his death. They spent money on getting the Remix off the ground, they’re paying for upcoming renovations to the Moda Center and they let Joe Cronin significantly expand the front office (more on that later in the mailbag).
I do wish Jody Allen would be more visible. Say something, do an interview or a press conference, anything to change the perception that she’s disengaged or cheap or doesn’t care or anything else that’s out there about her. Everything I’ve heard from people high up in the organization is that none of that is true and she’s been very supportive and active behind the scenes since she took over the franchise, but I can’t speak to that for myself because I’ve never met her or had any kind of interaction with her whatsoever.
Maybe a new owner would be better, or maybe it would be worse. Except in extreme cases like Donald Sterling or Robert Sarver, it’s never that simple.
As a lifelong Blazers fan, I'm well aware of the team's well-documented struggles to be a destination for free agents so I was pretty surprised Portland was able to poach Mike Schmitz from ESPN in 2022. Apologies if this has been previously covered, but I was curious what piqued their interest about this team and I'm curious what sort of impact Schmitz has had behind the scenes. Thanks for the mailbag and keep up the great work!
- Matt
Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic had a great story about a year or so ago on how Schmitz wound up leaving ESPN to work for the Blazers, if you want the full backstory there. The short version: After having his interim tag removed, Cronin was looking to build out his front-office staff and had always respected Schmitz's work covering the draft; meanwhile, Schmitz was over the public-facing aspect of working for a major national media outlet and wanted to transition over to the team side, where he could just travel and scout without having to worry about being on TV or having his opinions on players picked apart by the public. The timing just made sense for both sides.
If you want two specific examples of things Schmitz done for the organization: he was the one that had Ibou Badji on his radar before the Blazers signed him to a two-way contract last season, and he was the one that Joe Cronin tasked this past summer with running point on putting together the Remix front office and infrastructure. He's also widely credited with pushing hard to draft Shaedon Sharpe, since he was one of the few who had seen him play AAU given that he didn't play at Kentucky, but both Schmitz and others in the organization have pushed back against the idea that he was the sole driver of that decision.
Schmitz is the most high-profile hire Cronin has made since taking over, having been on ESPN, but he's just the public face of what has been a wider organizational makeover during that time. Under the previous front-office regime, the Blazers only had one international scout, which borders on negligence for a league where the winners of the last five MVP awards (and likely this one, too) are all non-Americans, and arguably the two best players in the league, Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo, weren't lottery picks and weren't on every team's radar. If you don't have a strong international scouting department, you have no chance to be the team that finds the next Giannis or Jokic. The Blazers have made several hires in that realm; Schmitz is just one of them.
On a selfish level, I've enjoyed having a public record of what one of the assistant GMs of the team I cover thinks about the majority of players coming into the league. Famously, the day after the 2022 lottery, Schmitz appeared on an episode of Adrian Wojnarowski's podcast and said that Portland should take Sharpe with the No. 7 overall pick if he was still on the board. When he took the job with the Blazers a month later, I filed that away and sure enough, that's who they drafted. And like most people, I'd never heard of Badji when the Blazers first signed him last season, but a quick Google search of "mike schmitz espn ibou badji" brought up a pretty detailed scouting report he'd written from the FIBA Under-18 African championships in 2020.
That's going to lessen the longer he's with the team and the more draft classes there are that he isn't covering for ESPN but for now, it's very helpful to me (probably to the annoyance of the front office).