Recalibrating Expectations

It's entirely possible that in a week, the Trail Blazers are coming home from a four-game road trip with a .500 record on the season after their surprising 10-6 start.

They open in Milwaukee against Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Bucks, who will likely be without Khris Middleton but have still looked like title favorites to start the year. Then they go to Cleveland to face what has so far been a very good Cavs team. Then they go to New York to play a Brooklyn Nets team that already beat them last week, as well as the Knicks, who aren't very good but aren't an easy out most nights.

They'll have to do all of this once again without Damian Lillard, who is expected to miss at least the start of the road trip after re-aggravating his right calf. Don't be surprised if he sits the entire four-game swing out of an abundance of caution. It would be in line with the way the Blazers have handled injuries thus far this season, and they feel comfortable in their ability to win tough games on the road without him.

It's unlikely the Blazers actually go 0-4 on the trip, but it's possible. It's equally possible they go 3-1. Their last road trip would have been a success at 3-3; instead, they went 4-2 and were a Spencer Dinwiddie three-point explosion away from possibly going 5-1.

How any of those finishes make you feel about where they are as a team depends on where your expectations were going into the season. For me, nothing has changed. I didn't think they were doomed after their listless preseason showing, and I didn't think they had vaulted into title contention after coming home from that first extended road trip with a 9-4 record. On our preseason predictions podcast, Erik and I both predicted they'd make the playoffs as a No. 7 or 8 seed out of the play-in tournament. I'm comfortable now upgrading that prediction and saying I think they'll be top-six in the west, barring a catastrophic injury.

I've said and written from the beginning that the benchmark will be how close they are to .500 around Christmas. Their schedule to start the season has been brutal, road-heavy and heavy on playoff-caliber teams. That's going to continue in the coming weeks, not just on this current road trip but with another six-gamer before Christmas and home games against the Clippers, Nuggets and Timberwolves.

Before the season, if you told me they were even within range of .500 by Christmas with that schedule, I would have said they're in good shape. Being 10-6 through the first 20 percent of the season gives them a little breathing room, not just to take it slow with Lillard's calf and Gary Payton II's continuing core muscle recovery, but to work through the turnover issues that continue to be their biggest weakness. Other teams like the Timberwolves and Clippers, who came into the season with title expectations, are close to hitting the panic button if they're not there already. The Blazers, thought by most people to be a play-in team, didn't lose two games in a row until the 15th and 16th games of the season.

Joe Cronin has said repeatedly, on the record, that he doesn't see this roster as a finished product and they don't think it's good enough to compete for a title as presently constructed. That wasn't a controversial statement, nor was it one most people who follow the league would disagree with. And nothing I've heard behind the scenes makes me think the organization's stance has changed because of the 10-6 start. Everybody in the building feels great about where they are, but they know there's more work to do. A move is coming, whether it be after Dec. 15 when most free agents signed this summer become trade-eligible, or closer to February's trade deadline. What that move is, I couldn't tell you right now. But they're going to do something. The roster they have right now is not going to be the roster in April when the playoffs start.

What I can tell you right now is that if I were a fan, I'd feel a whole lot better about this team right now than I did going into the season, regardless of what their record ends up being after the road trip. They haven't lost to any bad teams, taking care of Houston, Charlotte, San Antonio and the Lakers when they've come up on the schedule. The only game this season they were never really in was the second half of the Phoenix back-to-back after stealing the first game without Lillard and Anfernee Simons. Even last night, when they trailed by 19 in the third quarter and looked dead in the water against Utah, they clawed back and took the lead in the final few minutes. They're in games they wouldn't have been in last year, and their biggest offseason acquisitions, Jerami Grant and lottery pick Shaedon Sharpe, have exceeded all expectations.

The hot start wasn't going to last forever. But even with the Blazers coming back down to earth a little bit in the past week, it's hard to feel much better about where they are, if your expectations going into the year were as realistic as theirs were.