Trail Blazers Reaping the Benefits of G League in Rip City Remix's Inaugural Season
The Blazers' young players are already seeing the results of playing in competitive games.
PORTLAND, Ore. — For all intents and purposes, Ibou Badji made his NBA debut on Dec. 28 in the first of the Trail Blazers’ two back-to-back games at home against San Antonio.
He got in for 52 seconds of garbage time in the Dec. 26 win over Sacramento, officially becoming the first player from the NBA Academy Africa program to appear in an NBA game, but less than a minute of game time was the only stat he recorded. The back-to-back against the Spurs was his first real NBA action. With Deandre Ayton out with a knee injury and Duop Reath scratched minutes before tip with a back injury, Chauncey Billups had no choice but to call on the 7-foot-1 21-year-old Senegal native, who began playing basketball at age 14 and was signed by the Blazers on a two-way contract as an extremely raw developmental project.
And against all odds, facing Victor Wembanyama, Badji looked like he belonged on an NBA court. In 14 minutes, he logged seven points, nine rebounds and three blocks and was the only Blazers player with a positive plus-minus, finishing at +11 in a game Portland lost by 13.
It’s not hard to draw a direct line to Badji’s readiness for NBA action from the previous month he spent playing, and often starting, for the Blazers’ new G League team, the Rip City Remix.
“Him being able to get those minutes in the G League has been a big deal,” Billups said after that game. “I’ve always believed that most of basketball is just confidence. And you only get that from actually going out there and doing it and proving to yourself, first and foremost, that you can do it. When you do that, there’s a confidence and swagger that you have to have, and then you can start making believers out of everybody else.”
Badji isn’t the only one of the Blazers’ young players who has benefitted from extended reps in the G League. Two of their three 2023 draft picks, Kris Murray and Rayan Rupert, have spent the season going back and forth between the Blazers and Remix, who play home games at the Chiles Center on the University of Portland campus, which is close to both the Moda Center and the Blazers’ practice facility in Tualatin. Two-way forward Justin Minaya has spent most of the season with the Remix, where he’s started 12 games. Moses Brown, who has started at center while Ayton and Reath have been out, has also looked more comfortable in NBA games after playing significant minutes in the G League in the early part of the season.
Reath, whom the Blazers signed to a two-way contract in training camp, had a monster debut in the Remix’s first-ever game, putting up 37 points and 10 rebounds. The next day, he made his NBA debut and has remained the Blazers’ backup center since then. It’s unlikely he’s going to play for the Remix again this season—which is the exact goal of the G League. The hope is that once Rupert and Murray get their names called by Billups, they’ll do enough to stay with the Blazers for good after honing their strengths with the Remix.
“With Badji, Kris and Rupes, they’re getting live game reps, but it’s really about the confidence factor,” says Remix head coach Jim Moran. “Badji is blocking shots with us, so he knows that when he goes into an NBA game, it’s about blocking shots.”
Rupert in particular has made tremendous strides since July, when he looked completely out of his depth at Summer League in Las Vegas. In 16 games with the Remix, he’s averaging 13.7 points, six rebounds, 2.1 assists and 1.2 steals in 32.1 minutes per game and shooting 44.3 percent from three-point range on 4.1 attempts per game.
Long-term, the Blazers view the 19-year-old Rupert as a high-upside 3-and-D wing who will be an important piece to their rebuild. But there isn’t playing time for him or Murray right now with Toumani Camara, Matisse Thybulle, Jerami Grant and Jabari Walker taking up most of the minutes at the forward positions. Rupert has appeared in eight games with the Blazers and played a total of 36 minutes, mostly meaningless garbage time.
In the G League, though, he’s able to play real minutes. Eventually, be it after the trade deadline or next season, his opportunity with the Blazers will come just as it did with Badji and Reath.
“I can do a lot of things offensively,” Rupert says. “The G League is a great opportunity for me to show my offensive game.”
Until this year, the Blazers were one of two NBA teams without their own dedicated G League affiliate. For years, they used the G League sparingly, assigning players to other teams’ affiliates, where their development wasn’t as much of a priority as those organizations’ own players. It often wasn’t worth the trouble to send players out of town, and as a result, the Blazers’ prospects were denied the opportunity to get real game experience if they weren’t in the rotation.
Badji spent most of last season with the Blazers on a two-way contract and didn’t play a minute, which was by design. But because of the inconvenience of travel and assigning players to other G League teams out of town, he didn’t get any G League reps, either. All of his work last year came in practices and scrimmages, doing drills and watching film with the team’s player development staff. Valuable, yes, but no substitute for the speed and physicality of an actual game.
Blazers general manager Joe Cronin wanted to fix this hole in the organization from the time he took over the job two years ago. This summer, that plan came together and the Remix was unveiled in June debuted in November.
Now, in addition to being cheap, family-friendly entertainment in North Portland, the Remix’s location has proven useful to the organization itself. Cronin and members of his front-office staff attend games often, as do Billups and his staff when the Remix play on a Blazers off day. Several Blazers players, including Shaedon Sharpe, Anfernee Simons, Toumani Camara and Jabari Walker, regularly come to games to support their less-proven teammates as well.
“It’s so much easier to have them in the same building and have them around,” says Moran, who was with the Blazers as an assistant coach on Terry Stotts’ staff until Stotts was fired in 2021 and spent the next two seasons as an assistant in Detroit before coming back to Portland to coach the Remix. “Our guys can come here and see the games and see how they’re doing. Otherwise, the way it was before, we sent Ant to Ontario, we sent Gary Trent to Texas. You’re just watching film. You don’t know what they’re being told about how they’re supposed to play their minutes. Here, we’re all on the same page with the big team. The coverages are the same. The plays are the same. Guys’ roles will be a little different, but we’re able to monitor them in real time. That’s the importance of having them in the same building.”
The Remix’s first season has been up and down. They went 8-8 in Showcase Cup play, which wrapped up with the G League Winter Showcase in Orlando in late December. Since then, they’re 1-2, with the win being a come-from-behind overtime victory over the Delaware Blue Coats (the Philadelphia 76ers’ affiliate) on Saturday.
The likes of Murray and Rupert would not get to play in high-leverage situations like that with the Blazers this season, because Billups would almost certainly play his veterans and more proven players with a game on the line. But in the G League, they’ve gotten a taste of what it’s like to be on the floor at the end of a game that isn’t already decided.
“I think it’s important,” Moran says. “You have to be in those high-stress moments. You build a belief that you’re never really out of it. The G League mirrors the NBA in that no lead is safe. When I’ve been in the NBA, I’ve seen times where you build a 20-point lead and then get lackadaisical and go away from what’s working and it’s a two-possession game at the end. So I think it’s good for them to get this experience of being in tough situations and trying to figure it out.”
Murray, the No. 23 overall pick in the draft, didn’t do much in the limited minutes he played with the Blazers at the beginning of the season. But he’s steadily gotten more comfortable playing in the G League and had some nice moments with the Blazers since the Remix’s season started. In early December, after missing the Blazers’ previous four games on assignment with the Remix, he played a career-high 21 minutes in a close game with the Warriors, putting up six points, five rebounds, an assist and two steals and hitting two three-pointers.
“His confidence has changed,” Billups said. “You look at him in training camp and you look at him now, when I throw him in there. His confidence is just totally different because he's getting those actual minutes of play in the G League. You see how the [Remix] games are, they play physical, they play fast. It's a tough league. It gives you the confidence to understand how to play, and then to understand what's needed when you get back to the varsity team.”