Notes, Thoughts and Takeaways From Trail Blazers' Exit Interviews
Joe Cronin, Chauncey Billups and Portland's most important players spoke to reporters following the end of the regular season.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Say this for the end of the Trail Blazers' season: it was efficient.
The officiating crew working the Moda Center on Easter Sunday afternoon understood the assignment and didn't drag out the Blazers' 56-point blowout loss to the Warriors with a parade of free throws or any video reviews. Fans were in and out in less than two-and-a-half hours.
Afterwards, the team's media-relations staff did us beat writers a solid, taking advantage of the early start time and knocking out exit interviews so everyone could start summer vacation. General manager Joe Cronin and head coach Chauncey Billups conducted their end-of-season press conferences on Sunday, as did the team's five most important players: Damian Lillard, Jusuf Nurkic, Anfernee Simons, Jerami Grant and Shaedon Sharpe.
The headline from the day is the pressure Cronin is under this summer to make good on his promise to give Lillard a real chance to contend. But there was plenty more that was discussed in Sunday's exit interviews that's worth unpacking.
Damian Lillard's patience, or lack thereof
This is the only thing that really matters, at the end of the day. Nothing Lillard said on Sunday is out of step with what he's been saying since the season went sideways in December.
"I see a road to what we could do," he said. "But it's a difference in, 'We can do this and we can do that' and actually doing it."
The Blazers were in a similar position last summer. Leading up to the draft, after swinging the trade for Grant, they pursued O.G. Anunoby by dangling the No. 7 overall pick. Toronto's asking price of other players ultimately proved too high and Portland instead decided to keep the pick and take Sharpe. Lillard wasn't thrilled at the time that they decided not to truly go all-in on making win-now moves, but getting Grant was enough to keep him happy, and Grant proved to be a great fit. (More on this in a bit.)
It's safe to say Lillard isn't up for a repeat of that draft night.
"I don't have much of an appetite for building and guys two and three years away from really going after it," he said. "We get Shaedon at 19, and he's just different. Being around him, his disposition, how he listens, his frame and his natural talent, that's enough 19-year-old, you know what I'm saying? You probably won't find one that will come along the way he has. I just ain't interested in that, being honest. And it's not a secret. I want a chance to go for it. And if the route is to do that, that's just not my route. I think we're all in line with how to put a team together that can actually go out there and get something done."
The draft lottery takes place in Chicago on May 16. After finishing with the fifth-worst record in the league, Portland will have a 10.5 percent chance at winning the No. 1 overall pick. I can tell you with absolute certainty that if that happens, they aren't trading the pick and will take Victor Wembanyama. That would be a franchise-changing event on par with the Cavaliers winning the LeBron James lottery in 2003 or the Spurs winning the Tim Duncan lottery in 1997, if the hype is to be believed (and you can watch Wembanyama's games on the NBA's official app to decide for yourself). Those odds hitting for Portland would change a lot of things for a lot of people.
But if it's not Wembanyama, there's a good chance they're drafting for another team. At least, if Lillard has his way. And from the sound of it, he and Cronin are on the same page about wanting to win now.
Lillard was asked on Sunday what's changed between the summer of 2021, when a trade request seemed imminent for a few months, and now.
"I think then, I was more emotional about it, and now I'm not as emotional," he said. "It either will be or it will not be."
I can think of something else that's changed between then and now. Something that, if it hadn't changed, Lillard wouldn't still be here. His level of communication and synergy with the front office is something that didn't exist 18 months ago.
"That's out of our control," Cronin said when asked if he's worried about Lillard finally asking out if he can't get a big deal done this summer. "If that time ever comes, it comes. For me, our key thing is, just keep communicating. If we're on the same page, if we're both working towards the same goal, I don't see why it would ever deviate. That's just how I look at it. We all want the same things. Whether we're able to go out and accomplish exactly what we're trying to do, we'll see. Until that happens, I don't think there's any reason to even concern ourselves with it. He knows where we stand, how we feel about him, and we know where he stands and how he feels about us. So let's just go out and get it done."
Universal support for Chauncey Billups
Everybody who spoke to reporters on Sunday knows big changes are needed. It sure doesn't sound like the person drawing up the plays will be one of those changes.
Through two seasons with the Blazers, Billups has a 60-104 record as a head coach, although a good amount of those games were ones the organization was actively trying to lose to improve their lottery position. In that time, there's been major front-office and organizational change, massive roster turnover and injuries—not exactly circumstances conducive to a new coach getting comfortable.
One thing Billups has across the board is the support of his players, and his boss.
"I love Chauncey," Nurkic said Sunday. "I love playing for him, I love being coached by him and his staff. My three-point shot improved because of him and his coaching staff, period. Overall, he brings a lot to the table. Sometimes, it's a bad situation because everything falls on the coach, and I don't think that's the case. I really disagree with that. I think everybody can be blamed, but I don't think Chauncey can be."
Grant echoed the sentiment.
"I think he's a great coach," he said. "He's still learning. But the biggest thing that he gets from us is we want to play for him. As a coach, people overlook that aspect of things. Having someone that you want to go to war with is huge. The X's and O's, he has them. He's still learning how to put it into play."
In a departure from previous front-office regimes, Cronin acknowledged that Billups' failures are as much on him as they are on the coach.
"I think he's done a great job," he said. "I don't think I dealt him a great hand this season. We made some good additions and our starting lineup started to get pretty solid, but I don't think I did him any favors by giving him the lack of depth that would have given us any sustainability once we had some of these injuries. We're confident we can score the ball, but we struggled defensively. We just didn't have the personnel that was going to get that done. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt there. That's on me. I've got to give him a deeper, more balanced bench."
In the two seasons I've covered Billups on a day-to-day basis, I've found him to be extremely thoughtful, engaging and willing to be honest about his own shortcomings. At times throughout this season, he's been shockingly introspective and vulnerable about the fact that he's learning on the fly.
Just from how forthright he is with the media, it's not hard to see how that also translates to his players.
"My guys know how I am," he said Sunday. "They know how I feel. I'm very fair with all of them. They know all I care about is winning. I coach them as hard as I can, but I try to coach them as smart as I can. I'm pretty sure over the course of the year, there are a lot of guys in the locker room that are upset with me. Maybe about how I coach them, maybe about not playing that much. But there's not going to be one guy you talk to that will say I wasn't fair with them, I wasn't honest with them. I can just remember me as a player, that's what I respected the most, if a coach was honest with me and if he was fair."
The second half of last season, after Lillard was shut down with the core muscle surgery and the months-long tanking effort began, Billups began having fun. He was able to try out different lineups and let players develop without worrying about being judged on wins and losses. As soon as Lillard had the surgery last January, everyone knew the playoffs weren't in the cards, so Billups could focus on teaching.
This year, as a team with a healthy Lillard and other good players underachieved, the losing visibly weighed on Billups much more. And when they pulled the plug on the final month of the season, it was less of an opportunity for the coach to grow and more of a sense of, "Here we go again." Billups has not hidden in the past month that he doesn't love the situation he found himself in and doesn't want it to happen again.
He's going to get at least one more shot in Portland, ideally with the kind of roster he's wanted all along.
"I really look forward to the opportunity to coach a really competitive team, to be able to show my growth," he said.
Jerami Grant's free agency should be drama-free
Every June 30, in the opening seconds of free agency, a flurry of agreements happen that in no way were already negotiated ahead of time, because that would be against league rules. Simons' four-year, $100 million deal to re-sign with the Blazers was one of those deals last summer. By all indications, Grant is going to re-up almost as quickly this year.
Lillard said he expects Grant to be back. The man himself didn't disagree.
"I definitely like it here," he said. "Looking forward to the talks and trying to figure something out. I definitely feel comfortable here."
Grant had been linked to Portland since the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, when Lillard began recruiting him while they were USA Basketball teammates. Lillard pushed hard for the trade that eventually happened last June, and Grant fit well in the early-season version of the Blazers' lineup, before the injuries and other adversity hit. There's no reason for both sides not to want to continue the partnership.
"It's a family setting," Grant said. "Just being here for this year, I've been able to become really close friends with a lot of people on the team, a lot of staff. For me, that's a huge part of where you want to work, who you want to be around for the next five years or whatever."
The key phrase in that answer is "five years." In January, Grant became eligible for a four-year, $112 million extension that he can sign at any time between now and free agency opening on June 30. He's not going to, but only because he can get a fifth year and more money by waiting until he hits free agency.
"It can always go in a million different directions, but I think foundationally we feel really solid," Cronin said. "The Trail Blazers organization loves Jerami Grant, and I think the feeling's mutual. He loves his teammates, he loves his coach, he loves this city. Usually, when those things align, you can get a deal."
The Anfernee Simons-Shaedon Sharpe question
Cronin has made no secret of his desire to make a splash on the trade market this summer. What's become clear: if the Blazers are truly going to continue building around Lillard, which they are, then both Simons and Sharpe can't still be on the roster in September. One or the other has to go.
On Sunday, both Cronin and Billups walked right up to the line of actually saying that part out loud. They know.
"I think it's something we have to look at," Cronin said. "I look at it as a great problem to have. I wish we had a multitude of talent at every position and we had to figure out how to maximize each of those guys. Their games are different, but at the same time, they play similar positions. Both are more two than one or three. I think you've got to figure that out and you wonder, how does the fit work, how do the minutes work, are there other holes that you need to fill instead? It's an exercise that we'll have to go through and evaluate. But on an individual level, I love both those guys. I think they're both mega-talented and I'm thrilled we have them."
Billups, asked if Sharpe and Simons can play together long-term, answered: "I'm not sure."
​​"Those kinds of decisions will be made by people in higher positions than me," he said. "But those two guys are really, really good young players and I'm pretty sure they have a ton of value everywhere. So I don't know the answer to that question."
As far as which one it will be, it depends on who's out there to be had and how they fit. Reading the tea leaves, if the organization had their choice of which one to keep, they would love for it to be Sharpe.
Billups called Sharpe's development, particularly the leap he made near the end of the season after Lillard and Simons were shut down, "the bright spot of our season."
"Nobody knew before the season if I was even gonna play the kid," he said. "I put him in the rotation from the very first game and he played every game, pretty much. My reason for doing it was I felt it was necessary to see what we had in him, and you can't see that if you don't play. I was going to have to live through his [mistakes]. There's gonna have to be some real decisions made for us to become a real competitive, contending team. It is what it is."
Let's go back to the quote from Lillard above. The one that's been plastered on ClutchPoints and Bleacher Report with the eyes emojis about his future, about not wanting to wait for more 19-year-olds to develop. In there, he brought up Sharpe unprompted, as an exception to the rule.
"We get Shaedon at 19, and he's just different. Being around him, his disposition, how he listens, his frame and his natural talent, that's enough 19-year-old, you know what I'm saying? You probably won't find one that will come along the way he has."
That Lillard is that impressed with how Sharpe has come along, given both his close friendship with Simons and how skeptical he was of the decision last summer to draft him rather than trade the pick, is significant to me, just in reading it and trying to predict where things might go.
Sharpe's rookie season was predictably up-and-down, especially considering he didn't play his freshman season at Kentucky and had a shoulder injury five minutes into his first Summer League game last July. But in the last month of the season, something clicked and he began to put the raw physical talent to use on a more consistent basis.
He still has a long way to go, though.
"This will be a big summer for him," Cronin said. "He needs to get out there and play and get these repetitions' and experience all these different scenarios. With Shaedon, his learning curve has been so quick. He's picked up things so quickly, I wouldn't put it past him to be ready very soon. That can mean a lot of different things, but 'ready' as far as impacting winning, playing legitimate defense, making great decisions on the offensive end. I don't know if we can even put an accurate timeline on him. If we did that when we drafted him, we already would have been way off. I did not foresee him picking things up this quickly, this easily."
For his part, Sharpe says he believes he's ready to be a full-time starter. That can't happen with Simons still in Portland, unless Sharpe plays out of position at small forward.
It remains to be seen who the Blazers actually have the opportunity to trade for. There's a tier of superstars that Sharpe has to be included to get. That's a very small list and there's no guarantee any of them are available. But Sharpe may have played himself out of being dealt for anyone below that.
Simons seemed to understand it's at least a possibility.
"It's a part of the business," he said. "You can control things you can control. If I get traded, it's gonna be a part of my journey. It's something you can't control."
Everyone knows they need more veterans
The Blazers' roster had two fundamental issues this season. One was a lack of size outside of Nurkic, which forced Drew Eubanks and Trendon Watford to play above their heads when he was hurt. The other was a lack of veterans.
That was something both Billups and Lillard complained about publicly throughout the year. Lillard was the only player over the age of 30 on the team. In the past, he's always had an Ed Davis or a Carmelo Anthony to take some of the leadership duties off his plate. He didn't have that this year, and Billups didn't have many players to plug in that he knew would know what they were doing.
Nurkic brought it up when he was asked why he thought the team underperformed.
"In this league, you have to have veterans to win games," he said. "As much as I love young [players] and stories, I think at any stage, you have to have veterans to play when you're down people, when you're having bad luck with injuries. When you look at the history, there's not a lot of young teams that won championships. I think that's the biggest one. You've got to have experienced guys."
Part of Lillard's much-publicized Sunday comment about not wanting to draft another 19-year-old was about his desire to trade for a star, but part of it was also his long-standing frustration that he was the only true veteran on the team. His coach agrees.
"If we're all watching this game close enough and we understand what wins, as the playoffs start and you get to the final four and teams get eliminated, you're not going to see teams with four, five, six, seven young guys," Billups said. "It just doesn't happen. With that being said, I understand where Dame is coming from. Look at the two years that he's gone through. After having some success and going to the playoffs every year, he should feel that way and I think he has the right to feel that way. We all owe it to him to give him an opportunity and a chance, because he's been too good to all of us and to this fanbase. Everything that he feels, it should be considered and it should be done. It's that simple."
Even Cronin admitted that he should have considered experience more when he was putting the roster together. His love of taking home-run swings on talent is a double-edged sword: it resulted in Sharpe, but it also severely hamstrung them when injuries hit. On Sunday, he vowed not to make that mistake again.
"One of the things that we saw that caused us to lose a lot of ballgames was a lack of depth, and a lot of that was young guys that weren't ready to contribute," he said. "To me, that was the reckless part, where we have seven or eight guys who are a big part of our rotation. But as soon as things started to go awry, if one or two of those guys got hurt, all of a sudden we're starting to count on players who weren't ready to help us yet. So I think moving forward, we're not going to be in 'Let's try to find a player' mode. We're going to be more in win-now mode, where the rotation is going to be much more veteran-laden than it was this year. And I think that will help merge some of that, although it doesn't solve all of those concerns."
Other notes and loose ends
Cronin was asked where things stand on the Blazers' plans to get a G League team (they're currently one of two teams without one). "It's something we've been talking about a lot lately," he said. "A goal of ours is to get a team, hopefully in the near future." Just file that one away as something to watch in the coming weeks.
Nurkic's answer to a question about his future in Portland was long and worthwhile. "I mean, there's rumors every year," he said. "I have my family calling me every year, 'They're saying this, they're saying that.' They say that every year. One year, you might be right. I've said it before—as long as Dame's here and we aspire to win and build a championship team, I think I'm a player for that. As long as people want me here, I want to be here. I'm not going to ask for a trade or try to go somewhere else. It's my seventh season here. This is my home, regardless of what happens. At the end of the day, my phone's going to be on. If that happens, I'm going to still love all the guys. There's no bad taste or bad feeling about Portland and there's never gonna be. If they think they can get a better player for me, I don't know what they're waiting for."
On the subject of coaching, Cronin hinted that changes or additions could be coming to Billups' staff to add experience. There's no word yet as to which assistants may be out or who they'd target as replacements, as we're still in the infancy of this year's coaching carousel. The other day, my buddy Jake Fischer at Yahoo Sports reported that Billups' lead assistant, Scott Brooks, could be a candidate for the head coaching job in Houston that opened up when the Rockets parted ways with Stephen Silas at the end of the season. Brooks coached James Harden in Oklahoma City back in the day, and it's one of the worst-kept secrets in the league that Harden returning to Houston this summer is a serious possibility. That could also affect other things that could happen this summer, as it relates to impact players that could be targeted by teams in Portland's position looking to make major upgrades.
Sharpe didn't know whether or not he's going to play at Summer League in Las Vegas, but he said he wants to. My gut tells me he played himself out of it in the last month, and given that he suffered a shoulder injury in the first five minutes of his debut last July that cost him most of the offseason, I wouldn't be surprised if the organization decides it's not worth the risk. I would expect Jabari Walker and Keon Johnson to play for the second year in a row. Both of the Blazers' two-way players, John Butler Jr. and Ibou Badji, will probably play as well.