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Two games into their first-round playoff series, how are the Trail Blazers' vibes?
It depends on what you mean by "Trail Blazers."
If you're talking about the basketball team, the vibes haven't been this good in seven years.
If you're talking about the multimillion-dollar company, they haven't been this bad, well, maybe ever.
It's truly jarring to think about the two things side-by-side and the opposite feelings they engender.
On the court, this is the deepest, most exciting and most fun group the Blazers have had since the Damian Lillard-Wesley Matthews-Nicolas Batum-LaMarcus Aldridge-Robin Lopez teams of the mid-2010s. Everywhere you look on the roster, there are great stories and players that are easy to root for.
Deni Avdija is a first-time All-Star and Most Improved Player finalist, the closest thing Portland has seen to a franchise player since Lillard's peak. Toumani Camara and Donovan Clingan have real cases to make All-Defensive teams. Scoot Henderson is finally having his breakout moment on the biggest stage of his career. Robert Williams III has been a bench X-factor in the playoffs after years of injuries. Jrue Holiday is bringing exactly the kind of heady, winning play the Blazers brought him here to give them.
And with Victor Wembanyama's status for the rest of the series up in the air after he suffered a concussion in Game 2 on Tuesday, the Blazers suddenly have a real shot at upsetting San Antonio as a seventh seed, especially if they take Game 3 at home tomorrow. The Blazers have gotten some mentions on basketball-nerd podcasts throughout the year as a "sneaky fun League Pass team." Now that it's the playoffs, they're getting national attention as the "surprise" team of the first round. If you're a fan, there's nothing not to love about what's happening on the court right now and where they're headed in the future, whether they win this series or not. And by the way, Lillard is coming back next year.
Off the court, new owner Tom Dundon is speed-running the Donald Sterling/Robert Sarver reputational arc in three weeks. Reports of gratuitous cost-cutting measures like earlier hotel checkout times for support staff and leaving important digital content staff and (most egregiously) two-way players at home for the playoffs have made the Blazers a national story for reasons that have nothing to do with all the great things happening on the floor. Bill Simmons, the most influential sports media personality of the last 25 years who hosts the most popular sports podcast in the country, gave Dundon a derogatory nickname ("El Cheapo") that looks like it might stick. Nearly every major nationalmedia outlet has talked or written about it in the last week.
It's never a great sign when the commissioner of the NBA is doing damage control on a podcast for a guy who's owned one of his league's teams for less than a month.
On the court, the Blazers are about to play their first home playoff game in five years. And really, their first playoff game in front of a true home crowd since their Western Conference Finals run in 2019. The 2020 playoffs happened in the Disney World bubble, and the 2021 playoffs, the last time they made it, happened when NBA arenas were still being sold at half-capacity due to the pandemic. The team announced tomorrow's Game 3 as a full sellout. This will be the first time in a long time that it really feels the way it used to in Portland when the Trail Blazers were in the playoffs.
"Man, I already know Rip City gonna be turnt," Henderson said after his career night in the Blazers' Game 2 win. "Even if we were 0-2, I know they'd be cheering us like we were 2-0. So shoutout to Rip City, all love to them and I hope they break the walls down while we're there."
Off the court, Blazers president of business operations Dewayne Hankins accidentally let slip in a TV interview last week that fans won't get free t-shirts for Games 3 and 4, as is the norm around the NBA for playoff games. This normally wouldn't be that big a deal, but the new ownership group had already come under a microscope for being cheap and lost the public benefit of the doubt by the time that news broke, so the absence of shirts, for lack of a better term, became a whole thing.
Co-owner Sheel Tyle quickly jumped on social media to do damage control and promise fans that the reason they aren't giving out shirts is because they actually have something even cooler planned instead. We'll find out tomorrow what that something is, and you can judge for yourself whether Tyle was overselling it or not. But fans should not be in a position to have to stress about whether the team is cutting corners on in-game giveaways heading into such a momentous game.
We aren’t doing t-shirts because we are doing something else. Moda will be rocking for Game 3 & 4 @trailblazers
On the court, the coaching job Tiago Splitter has done this season and early into the playoffs has been nothing short of remarkable. He was forced to take over as head coach on the second day of the season when Chauncey Billups was arrested as part of a massive FBI gambling investigation, and he not only kept the train on the tracks and navigated that scandal internally, he got the Blazers to greatly outperform their talent level and injury luck. Henderson, Holiday, Shaedon Sharpe, Matisse Thybulle and Jerami Grant all missed significant time, and Avdija, their best player, was in and out of the lineup for weeks with back issues. When both Henderson and Holiday were out, they had to play without a reliable point guard for multiple months. Despite all that, Splitter not only kept everyone bought-in and focused, he won a tough play-in game on the road in Phoenix to cap off a 42-40 season and get the Blazers back to the playoffs.
"He got thrown in a difficult situation," Avdija said after the Blazers' series-tying win over the Spurs on Tuesday. "It wasn't easy for him to just all of a sudden take the head job. But I think he's done phenomenal. He's getting the best out of everybody. He's believing in each and every single one of his players, and we love playing for him. He's a winner. He's a competitor. He knows how it is to win a championship. He's passionate, and he got all the tools to be a great coach, and that's what he's doing."
Off the court, while Splitter is guiding the Blazers through their most fun and exciting playoff run in a long time, he's being publicly humiliated with near-daily leaks and reports about Dundon wanting to give his job away if he can find a Division II college coach willing to do it for slightly less money. Splitter has handled this distraction about as well as anyone could, just like he did the Billups scandal. But however true those rumors are, he's been put in a position by ownership where he has to be asked about them during the playoffs, which is grossly unfair to him and casts a cloud over this storybook run.
"Just trying to be a pro," Splitter said before Game 2 in San Antonio when asked about the rumors swirling around his job security. "Try to focus on my locker room and my staff to stay and think about basketball. Same way when I got the job and all the stuff that was going on."
Doing this job, you become the person in your social circles that people want to talk to about the Blazers, whether they're hardcore fans or not. And in the last two weeks, texts I've been getting from people in my life that I'd describe as casual basketball watchers are an even split between "This team is really fun and I'm excited for the playoffs" and "What the hell is this new owner's deal?"
I've covered a lot of really bad basketball over the last five years, much of it intentionally so as the Blazers tanked and rebuilt. Covering games that matter is a welcome change of pace. I am skipping my annual trip to the predraft combine in Chicago next month because the Blazers making the playoffs means they sent their first-round pick to the Bulls. For the first time since 2021, what happens on May 10 in the lottery is none of my business. I couldn't be happier about this.
I've also covered a lot of non-basketball headaches over those same five years that aren't any fun at all to write about. Neil Olshey hiring Billups despite a sexual assault allegation and then shutting down questions about it at the press conference; Olshey being investigated and fired months later for workplace HR violations; the Gary Payton II debacle with the Warriors attempting to smear Portland's medical staff to cover for their own lack of due diligence; all the nonsense I had to deal with from Miami state media in the summer of 2023 during Lillard's trade request; and, most recently, the head coach being arrested by the FBI in the middle of the night on the second day of the season.
You think I want to be talking about hotel checkout times for team staff during the playoffs?
Blazers fans haven't had a lot to be excited about over the last seven years since the Western Conference Finals run. What they've done on the court this year is finally starting to win them back. The new ownership group is doing everything in its power to lose the entire fanbase just as quickly.
I just hope one of those things wins out over the other.
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