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.
When Portland got the No. 3 pick last year, conversation immediately turned to what they could get for that pick on the trade market, and whether that would be enough to keep Damian Lillard happy. Until roughly a week before the draft, the assumption around the NBA, based on general manager Joe Cronin’s repeated public comments about wanting to push all his chips in around Lillard, was that the pick was for sale.
When that didn’t happen and the Blazers instead drafted Henderson, Lillard requested a trade and, as a result, Portland plunged into a rebuild that they hope won’t go on forever but will take at least one more year before they’re aiming to be back in the postseason mix.
Because Lillard is gone, and the team has no expectations to be competing next year for anything beyond another trip to the lottery, the intrigue around their picks, particularly the higher one, is less about what they can get in a trade and more about whether they can find someone worth adding to the young group headlined by Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe.
In a draft class considered by most analysts to be one of the weaker ones in recent memory, the potential to land a true high-end franchise-changer is lower. But the potential for a team’s board to break their way if the teams ahead of them have completely different rankings is higher.
“It’s opportunistic,” Cronin told me after the lottery results were announced. “There’s a lot of possibilities within this draft. Because there isn’t consensus, there’s going to be a lot of ability to move around in the draft. Potentially a guy that we would have ranked higher than most might be there at 7 or 14. For me, this could be a fun draft in that there isn’t something set in stone. It could be very vulnerable as far as guys jumping around.”
The Blazers’ full brain trust is in Chicago—Cronin, Oliva, fellow assistant GMs Mike Schmitz and Andrae Patterson, front-office staffers Asjha Jones and Sheri Sam, head coach Chauncey Billups—to scout and meet with prospects at the predraft combine. When they get back to Portland, they’ll start bringing players in for in-person workouts.
Last year, the Blazers held the No. 3, No. 23 and No. 43 overall picks, meaning they had a broad range of players to look at. This year, they have four picks: two in the lottery and two at the top of the second round. With the draft board being all over the place, the variety of players they’ll bring in will be just as wide if not wider.
The question this year isn’t whether they’ll use all of their picks, it’s whether they can. Trading their highest pick for veteran help doesn’t make sense anymore; avoiding adding four rookies to an already crowded rotation may.
Like last year, Cronin is evaluating his options between now and late June and not wedded to any outcome.
“I’m always open-minded to any possibilities,” he said. “Deal-by-deal, we’ll evaluate what’s out there and do what’s best for the team. But I have no issues adding two more young guys to the mix. We’re not good enough yet, so we’ve got to keep building this talent base.”
Too many players and picks. Let's see how creatively Trader Joe can navigate this.