Welcome to the Rose Garden Report

A new era of Portland Trail Blazers coverage starts now.

I'm not going to make this very long. If you're reading this, you probably know me and know my work. This is going to be where my coverage of the Portland Trail Blazers will live for the foreseeable future. Some things will be available to read for free; a lot of it will be paywalled. The premium stuff I will work as hard as I can to make worth your time and money. There will be a podcast (the first episode is posting later today). There will be subscriber mailbags. Really, it's going to be whatever you and I want it to be.

For a lot of reasons, this is the right time for me to go all-in on covering the Blazers on a day-to-day basis in this way. This is a massive offseason for the franchise, maybe the biggest since the 2007 draft. We'll know in two days whether Joe Cronin and his revamped front office will trade the No. 7 overall pick for a veteran or use it to take one of the dozen or so prospects they've brought in for workouts over the past three weeks. The task Cronin faces to retool quickly around Damian Lillard is not an easy one, and his success or failure to do so in the next month will determine the course of the next five years for the organization. Not to mention, there's a good chance the team is going to be sold in the next year, be it to Phil Knight or someone else.

We'll cover all of that here in the coming weeks. I'll be in Las Vegas for Summer League for the 10th year running—my first one was Lillard's rookie year, when it was immediately clear how good he could be. Once the news-making part of the offseason is behind us, I'm going to write some longer features and try out different stuff. And when training camp and the season start in the fall, I'll be there every day. I'm hopeful we'll have some semblance of the pre-COVID locker-room access back next season, which will allow me to actually get to know these guys—and in turn give you more in-depth coverage—for the first time in three years.

I'm still figuring out a lot of things about what this next phase of my Blazers coverage is going to look like, but the more of you come and join me, the more cool stuff we'll be able to build. Let's have some fun.