MAILBAG: Trade Odds, Who Will Surprise in Camp
MAILBAG: Trade Odds, Who Will Surprise in Camp
Plus, a Shaedon Sharpe health update, and just how long are the Blazers going to be rebuilding?
Something about the final week of the offseason always seems to bring about absolutely seismic Trail Blazers news.
One year ago this week, the now-retired Adrian Wojnarowski delivered the biggest basketball-related news the franchise had seen at least a decade:
A year later, on Monday night, news came down that, it can be argued, has just as big of long-term implications for the organization on the business side: all of their games going forward will be available to watch for free on over-the-air network TV and through a streaming package.
Why did the team announce news this massive at 8:30 p.m. on a Monday, rather than lead with it in the morning? The answer to that is actually pretty simple: KATU is Portland’s ABC affiliate, and coming out of Monday Night Football, a larger-than-usual percentage of sports fans’ TVs in the Portland area would already be tuned to the channel, allowing them to make a big splash by announcing it live on the local news.
The jury is out on the Lillard trade. I still believe it’s the best deal Joe Cronin could have gotten last summer given the circumstances, but it will be several years before all of the picks convey and we know where it all lands.
But this TV news? That’s an immediate win, across the board. The Blazers are going from a ROOT Sports partnership everyone hated, which severely limited who could watch their games and forced those who did get the channel to deal with subpar picture and sound quality, to a station anyone with a TV antenna can get for free. The BlazerVision streaming package is very reasonably priced, too. $120 for the season comes out to a little under $1.50 per game, not even factoring in that it also comes with a pair of tickets to a home game.
Whenever I’ve been asked about the team’s future TV plans, which came up in a couple of earlier offseason mailbags, I’ve had to give a cryptic non-answer to the effect of, “They’re still figuring out the details but I think people are going to like it.” Now you see what I mean. After the disaster that was last season from a TV standpoint, when Comcast’s last-minute ROOT Sports price hike caused a nearly 50 percent drop in the team’s local TV ratings, I had a pretty good idea that the organization was going to do everything in their power to make sure that didn’t happen again going forward.
But just like with the prolonged Lillard trade talks last offseason, it took all summer for the Blazers to hammer out the details and get it right. They were one of the worst teams in the NBA last year and they’re going to be one of the worst teams in the NBA again this year. Last year, they were bad and logistically a pain to find on TV. You can’t be both. And going forward, they won’t be. It’s hard to find a downside with the way this worked out.
Blazers fans aren’t used to pure, unqualified good news, especially lately. You should be celebrating this week.
(And, selfishly, more people being able to watch the team easily and for free means more people who could be interested in reading about the team, which you can do right here all season.)
On that note, with less than a week to go before Monday’s media day and the official kickoff of training camp, here’s the first of two parts of the final offseason mailbag, which covers the latest on the trade front, a Shaedon Sharpe health update and who might surprise in camp.
If you had to predict, who do think will surprise us this year in terms of jump or impact? I know a lot of us weren’t anticipating Toumani having the success early he had so just curious if you think more might click for Scoot in year 2 or maybe someone else.
- Shane L.