The Trail Blazers Still Need a G League Team

LAS VEGAS — Like the other 29 teams, the Trail Blazers had a strong contingent of front-office and scouting staff at the NBA's annual G League Winter Showcase. Unlike all but one of those other franchises, they did not have a team playing.

The Blazers are one of two teams (the other being Phoenix) without their own G League affiliate. It's well past time for that to change, and it's going to at some point.

Since its creation as the NBDL in 2001, and especially since the introduction of two-way contracts in 2017, the G League has become a vital tool for organizational development across the board. The NBA is littered with success stories of players who got their start there—Blazers guard Gary Payton II, for one—but it's also a pipeline for future coaches and front-office executives at the NBA level. Nick Nurse was the head coach of Raptors 905 before being elevated to Toronto's staff and eventually the head job, where he ultimately won a championship. Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault also got his start with the Oklahoma City Blue.

Without a G League team, Portland has no players at the Showcase. Greg Brown III has spent some time with the Ontario Clippers this season, and there was a chance he'd be here. But with Jerami Grant missing a game on the road trip, they recalled Brown for added frontcourt depth.

Portland's two two-way contract players, Ibou Badji (who I wrote about Tuesday) and John Butler Jr., haven't spent any time in the G League yet. Because neither of them were with the Blazers for most of training camp, they're still learning Chauncey Billups' system and getting fully integrated with the organization. My understanding is that right now, that side of their development is being viewed as more important than getting them game reps with other G League teams.

If the Blazers had a G League team, that wouldn't be an either-or proposition. Besides the locational convenience of not having to send Brown to Southern California or Badji back to the Wisconsin Herd, they'd be able to hire their own G League coaching staff that shares Billups' principles and philosophies to create an environment for development consistent with the parent club, while also developing future coaches who could play a role on Billups' staff down the line.

With all the changes Joe Cronin has made in the past year in beefing up the Blazers' scouting, analytics and sports-science staffs, the logical next step is to get with the times and use the G League to the fullest. It's an expense, but so were all of these front-office hires. It's all part of the same goal, modernizing the way the organization does things after years behind the curve in a lot of areas.

The organization has flirted with the idea in the past. For two seasons, from 2012-14, they had a single-affiliate partnership with the Idaho Stampede, who later moved to Salt Lake City to become the Jazz's minor-league affiliate. They didn't make much use of it, and then-general manager Neil Olshey contended that it was more valuable to have young players around their NBA teammates than getting reps against lesser competition.

A primary issue with the Stampede setup in retrospect was the location. At seven hours by car from Portland, Boise was too far away to be able to keep everything fully integrated. The majority of G League teams today are either in the same city as their parent club, in a nearby suburb, or at most an hour or two away. A two-way contract player or young player a team wants to get game experience can practice with the NBA team one day and then play in a game in the G League the next night with minimal travel.

Whenever the Blazers get a G League team again, expect it to be somewhere in Oregon or Washington that's more convenient to send players back and forth. Figuring out a suitable venue for home games can be tricky—it isn't just a capacity issue, there are also considerations for finding a gym that can accomodate the kind of camera placement and angles the league requires for their live broadcasts of games.

For years, Olshey was openly and publicly dismissive of the idea that a G League team was useful. I asked him about it on media day in 2019 (at the 21-minute mark here) and he said, "I don't think we're at any kind of competitive disadvantage not having one" and then made reference to it being a financial "black hole." Draw your own conclusions as to why he felt that way. I certainly have a few. But I know for a fact that Cronin doesn't share that view on the topic. It's something everybody wants. It's just a matter of when and where.

My only prediction is that, whether they play in Beaverton or Salem or Vancouver, the official team name is going to involve "Rip City," going the Windy City Bulls/Capital City Go-Go/Motor City Cruise route. That's a branding idea they can have for free.