Trail Blazers' No. 7 and 14 Overall Picks Come With a Different Kind of Intrigue
Trail Blazers' No. 7 and 14 Overall Picks Come With a Different Kind of Intrigue
The Blazers' lottery luck was the opposite of last year. The circumstances could not be more different.
📍 CHICAGO — Everything about this year’s draft lottery was different from a year ago. Everything.
The stakes were opposite—there’s no Victor Wembanyama in this class, or even Paolo Banchero. If you ask 10 general managers who the No. 1 overall pick will be next month, you might get 10 different answers.
The tension in the sequestered lottery room, with executives from all 14 teams (including Trail Blazers assistant GM Sergi Oliva) and a handful of media members (of which I was one, for the second year in a row), was several orders of magnitude lower than it was last May. When San Antonio was called as the first lottery combination, cementing that they were getting Wembanyama, it was a league-shifting moment and everyone in the room knew it. This year, the winning combination (6-10-13-14, for those wondering) being called for Atlanta was met with a collective shrug.
The Blazers, too, had an opposite night from last year. In 2023, they had the fifth-highest odds and moved up to No. 3 overall, ultimately selecting Scoot Henderson. This year, with Henderson onstage, the Blazers’ own pick fell back three spots, from fourth to seventh. They also got the No. 14 overall pick from Golden State, as expected.
The other, and most important, difference between the Blazers’ result last year and this year is what’s at stake.