MAILBAG: Would the Trail Blazers Trade Down in the Draft?
Plus questions on the future of ROOT Sports, WNBA expansion, Kris Murray vs. Jabari Walker and more.
Here’s the reality of covering a team as early in a rebuild as the Trail Blazers are: this time of year, and the next three months, hold more intrigue than time of the year when games are going on.
As I told you at the end of the season, this was a tough year for holding interest and subscribers. I expected as much. The team wasn’t very good, the games weren’t very accessible on TV (which we’ll cover below), and when those two things combine, people check out. I probably would too if I was in a different line of work and just watching these games for fun.
Overall, since the start of the season, I essentially held even when it comes to subscribers coming on board and dropping off, which I consider a win given the circumstances.
Since the end of the season, it’s been a different story. Starting with exit interviews two weeks ago, and continuing as we’ve pivoted into offseason lookahead coverage, I’ve had a good number of new subscribers come on board. When everyone knows their favorite team is going to be bad in the present, they become more interest in the future, which is full of possibilities, realistic and not.
For those of you that are brand-new, welcome. We do these mailbags roughly once a month, whenever it makes sense in the NBA calendar. It’s a good way to cover a variety of different topics at once and tailor my coverage directly to the things that you, the paying customer, are interested in.
And for those of you that haven’t come on board as paid subscribers yet, now would be a great time to consider it. Draft and offseason coverage is beginning to ramp up between now and late June, and a lot of that content is going to be behind the paywall. This is one of the busiest times of year, but also one of the most expensive times for me. I have two important trips coming up—to Chicago in two weeks for the lottery and predraft combine, and to Las Vegas for Summer League in early July. Being independent means having to pay for that travel myself, which is completely worth doing for me to bring you the best coverage of the Blazers that you’ll get anywhere. But it’s not cheap, and your support is what keeps me going.
Further proving my point that this is the busiest time of year: I put out a call for mailbag questions on Thursday morning and had to disable comments after less than a day because you already gave me enough for two parts.
Today’s installment covers a wide range of topics including the Blazers’ draft strategy, where things stand with ROOT Sports and the Portland WNBA expansion effort. Part two will run tomorrow and get into Anfernee Simons’ future and some other offseason roster topics.
Hey Sean, thanks for the great coverage this season. My question is sort of centered around the draft but is course still somewhat contingent on where they land in the lottery. Because this draft has been well documented as a less top end talent heavy draft, do you think the front office is vetting moving off their top pick for a proven commodity (assuming it lands anywhere but #1) and still selecting for best fit and taking a flyer on a guy at 14?
- Shane L.
I don’t think they’d move off the pick entirely, because while no one in this draft projects as a franchise centerpiece, there are still a few guys that most front offices think can be very good. (There’s no real consensus as to who those guys are, but that’s another story.) The Blazers aren’t really in a position to turn away a top-10 pick in any draft.
With that said, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were open to trading back a couple of spots, even if they get the No. 1 overall pick. The lack of a firmly established hierarchy means teams’ boards are all over the place. Let’s say the Blazers win the lottery in a couple weeks and get the top pick, and a team they have reason to believe doesn’t have the same player at the top that they do wants to trade up. If you can trade back and still get your guy, that’s something to look at.
It’s not just about getting an extra asset for trading back, either. Money is also a consideration. The rookie salary scale is set—for this year, the No. 1 pick gets a starting salary of $10.5 million, the No. 2 pick gets $9.3 million, the No. 3 pick gets $8.4 million, and so on.
If the player you’re getting at the top is a franchise cornerstone of the caliber of recent No. 1 picks like Victor Wembanyama, Paolo Banchero or Anthony Edwards, you’re thrilled to be paying them essentially mid-level money for four years before their big extension kicks in. But in a draft like this, where even the best player probably isn’t as good as any of the guys I just named, and there isn’t a huge difference in talent level between the players taken at No. 1 and No. 5, you feel good about moving back and saving a little money while also getting the guy you want.
It’s why I don’t think Blazers fans should be losing too much sleep about the lottery next month. Last year, everyone knew that whoever won was getting Wembanyama and it would change the course of their franchise for the next decade (for example, I have on pretty good authority that if the Blazers had won the Wemby lottery, Damian Lillard wouldn’t have requested a trade). Next year, there could be similar stakes if Cooper Flagg is as good as people think he is. But this year, if the Blazers end up with the fifth or sixth pick instead of the second or third pick, they’ll be OK.
Hey Sean! Where do things stand between the Blazers and ROOT Sports at the moment? Today’s news of the Kraken parting ways with them gives me an increased hope for watching games next season, but I’m not sure where things are since the last update. Thank you!
- Brennen W.
Like you, I found the Kraken’s announcement very interesting, and there are definitely implications for the Blazers there. I don’t know all the specifics of what it could look like, but I will say this: the organization was not happy when Comcast sprung the ROOT Sports price increase on subscribers two weeks before the season began, and they know it’s not tenable for the team’s viewing situation to be the same next season.
Friend of the program Danny Marang reported a lot of details about the ROOT deal on his Jacked Ramsays Patreon (which you should be subscribed to along with this Substack). It takes time (and lawyers) for this stuff to get figured out but I would be very surprised if Blazers games aren’t much, much more accessible to fans going forward.
Any updates on a WNBA expansion in Portland?
- Josh B.
A theme of this mailbag so far seems to be “things I’ve been tracking closely but aren’t in a place where I can talk about them, so I have to be cryptic.”
Here’s what I can tell you: the WNBA expansion effort is not a dead issue at all, and there are still people that want to make it happen. I’m still trying to nail down exactly who’s involved or how close anything is, but as recently as two weeks ago at her predraft press conference, Cathy Engelbert told reporters that she wants the league to expand to 16 teams by 2028 (it’s currently at 12, with the San Francisco team that’s starting up in 2025 soon to make it 13), and specifically named Portland among a handful of other cities they’re still considering.
I think a WNBA team would be great for Portland and would do really well here. I hope it happens. But there’s a lot up in the air still.
I’ve heard a bunch of comments along the lines of “this is what we expected” regarding the 21 win season, when I see a team that was completely decimated by injuries. That’s not to say they were supposed to be a playoff team, but when so many guys who weren’t even part of the rotation end up playing major roles in the season, it has to change how you look at the team, at least to some degree.
How do you balance having so many key players out of the lineup when looking at the final record?
- Stu
They might have won a few more games if they’d had everybody healthy for longer, but the record isn’t the point in a rebuilding year. What you hope to see out of a year like this is your most important players playing together and developing together. On an individual level, they got some development from some of them. But you would have hoped they’d get to see what Scoot Henderson, Shaedon Sharpe and Anfernee Simons looked like playing at the same time for more than a couple of games, for example.
When people say “this is what they expected,” they’re not talking about the final record as much as how rough it can be some nights. Even if they’d had everybody healthy the whole year, there’s a chance a team this young and inexperienced would have gotten blown out by 60 at some point, because that’s what young teams do. They’ll probably win roughly a similar amount of games next year; you just hope they can stay healthier while doing it.
Do you think the FO will go all in on trading vets to prioritize development? It seems that they can squeak under the tax and max roster spots by dealing Brogdon/Matisse, 2024 picks, and/or a young forward. This would be consistent with the FO saying they want to start competing. It’ll be hard to compete if they deal Jerami and Anfernee this offseason.
- Peter G.
I don’t think they’ll go 100 percent all-in on trading every veteran, because you can’t have an entire roster of 21-year-olds. They’ll definitely trade some of them, though. As we’ve covered, there’s no sense in keeping Malcolm Brogdon past this summer, and they can probably get a decent return for Matisse Thybulle.
A lot of this also depends on where the lottery lands and who they end up drafting. The guy I would guess most Blazers fans want (based on what I’ve seen online, anyway) is Alex Sarr, who plays Grant’s position. If they’re in a position to get him and that’s the way they go, maybe they move Grant, or maybe they try to replicate the way they slow-played Henderson’s development this season, letting him come off the bench behind someone like Brogdon who knows what he’s doing while the rookie gets up to speed.
I’d also tell you not to read too much into anyone saying they want to start competing. No GM or coach is going to get up at a press conference and say, “We want to lose again next year so we can get another high draft pick.” But that’s where these guys are going to be for at least one more year.
Hey Sean would love if you could dive deeper into why the Blazers will have to chose between Murray and Walker? Watching the playoffs and it’s pretty clear the successful teams typically have two forwards they bring off the bench. If it’s a salary crunch issue wouldn’t it make sense to move off a higher paid vet like Brogdon? They also appear to play different roles. Walker as a 4/small ball big and Murray as a pure wing. To me the argument is more around Scoot Vs Ant. Ant’s too small to play the 2 and there isn’t a history of successful teams that start 2 small guards, no matter what Olshey tried to say.
- Colin P.
What do we do with Tisse, Toumani, Jabari, Kris? All 4 guys at this point are defenders first and below average shooters. A lot of redundancy in play style for guys all fighting for the same minutes. What happens if one of our lottery picks is a wing that also starts fighting for these same minutes? People say we are guard heavy but we now have a weird group of upside guys at the wing.
- Cody Z.
There isn’t a perfect solution. The problem is that the redundancies they have on the roster aren’t the kind you want to have for a rebuilding team. Too many guys that, on a good team, would be solid role seventh or eighth men but not starters. Having too many of those guys is tough because, as Cody said, they’re all fighting for the same minutes and three of them (Thybulle excepted, because he’s already on a good-sized contract) will want to get paid in a year or two, whether that’s here or somewhere else.
Thybulle is the obvious one to move, because he’s got the most established value to contending teams. Camara is probably the closest to untouchable, even though I don’t think anyone on this roster should have that status. This is going to be a big year for all of them to separate themselves, or not.