Trail Blazers Training Camp Notebook: Fan Fest Good Vibes, A Big Year for Scoot Henderson

📍PORTLAND, Ore. — On Sunday afternoon, the Trail Blazers held their annual Fan Fest open scrimmage. This year, it was more needed than ever.

Inside Moda Center for two hours this afternoon, it was all good vibes and excitement for the upcoming season.

Here are some things that happened:

• Damian Lillard and Ja Morant both got massive cheers from the crowd of a few thousand, which is nothing compared to what the building will sound like on Wednesday when they kick off preseason against Golden State, and even more so two weeks from Wednesday when they kick off the season against Phoenix.
• Lillard hit several logo threes in a Portland Trail Blazers jersey in front of fans at Moda Center for the first time in over three years. After the first one, PA announcer Mark Mason said he hit the shot "from Klamath Falls." It's good to have that back.
• Morant won Fan Fest MVP, made a 360 layup, sank a halfcourt shot to break a regulation tie between the two squads, had teammates doing the "Call 12" celebration, and told Brooke Olzendam in a between-quarter interview that he was back to dunking again.
• New head coach Micah Nori took pictures and signed autographs for kids.
• Yang Hansen looked much more mobile and aware of where he needed to be on the court than he ever did at any point last season.
• Since there are no rookies this year to sing karaoke, Lillard made the entire team film dance videos as they entered the arena, and then punished the ones that didn't obey by having them dance on the court after the game concluded.

Here are some things that didn't happen:

• Any sighting or mention of Tom Dundon.
• Any talk amongst fans, from what I could tell, of relocation or cost-cutting or the sudden opening for a TV play-by-play broadcaster.
• Any injuries.
• Any bad vibes of any kind.

The Blazers organization needed a day that was all about what's possible this coming season on the court, rather than any of the nonsense that's been happening off it. Fan Fest provided that.

Some more notes from the first week of training camp:

Scoot Henderson Would 'Love' to Extend in Portland

Monday marks two weeks before the deadline for players from the 2023 draft class to sign rookie-scale extensions. There is no sense right now for how close the Blazers and Scoot Henderson's representatives at Klutch Sports Group are to working out a deal.

General manager Joe Cronin said on media day that the organization views Henderson as "still high-priority" despite getting Lillard back from the Achilles injury and trading for Morant, and said there's "seemingly mutual interest" in getting something done.

Henderson, for his part, said on Thursday that he hopes a deal gets done.

"I'd love to keep playing here, for sure," he said. "I'd love to keep playing in Portland."

Nori, for his part, is pleased with what he's seen from Henderson thus far.

"He’s been phenomenal," he said. "He’s been really, really good. The thing that we’re trying to do with Scoot is continue to play with pace. I tell him, ‘Go as fast as you can, and if someone’s in front of you, pass it and if not, just lay the ball in. I want to simplify his game. To me, Scoot is more of a combo-type guy than a pure point guard. I think he’d agree with that. I don’t need you to worry about everyone else as far as facilitating and orchestrating. We will get stuff off of you just pushing the pace.

"I look at him as a Russell Westbrook-type player. He can be dominant at both ends of the floor and he can impact the glass. He’s a strong, athletic guy and that’s how you want him to play when he’s on the ball. Play with pace, attack gaps, attack the paint, kick out from there. That’s what we’re looking for, and I’ve seen in him that it’s a relief. That’s how he wants to play and that’s how we need him to play, so it’s always good when that matches up.

"What I’ve seen from Scoot is, when he’s good, he’s good. But where he can get himself into a little bit of trouble, is when he’s playing in a little bit of a crowd and playing a little too fast for himself. Since I’ve been here, it’s been ‘good Scoot,’ at both ends of the floor. Asking him to be aggressive defensively, get into the ball, blow some things up, and he’s trying to do that."

The No. 1 Lesson From the Braiden Bell Fallout

Just about every angle of this week's latest PR disaster has been covered extensively.

The "grand opening, grand closing" of Braiden Bell's eight-hour tenure as the Blazers' TV play-by-play broadcaster can be whatever you want it to be. If you want to be the kind of person that digs up someone's old tweets from before they could legally drive a car, this story has that. If you want to turn it into a boring cancel-culture grievance fest and repeat the long-running (and tired) Fox News talking point that Portland is dying because of Woke, this story has that. If you want to make it about Tom Dundon's refusal to spend any money on anything, this story has that.

Here's what I want to make it about:

What if everyone just deleted their "X, The Everything App" accounts entirely?

I got rid of mine two weeks ago and it's great. I held on for a long time because I told myself I "need it for work" and "need it to stay informed" and I'm here to tell you, you really don't need it for either of those things. If a tweet is important enough that I need to see it, someone will send it to me. My biggest source of subscriber growth is current free subscribers deciding to convert, so that's unaffected.

From what little I've seen about what the discourse is on there around the Bell story, I'm not missing much of value. It seems like a lot of people getting mad on whichever side, because that's what you're supposed to do in these situations.

Putting aside however you feel about the owner of that website and his personal worldview, and some of the legitimately horrifying things that are produced on there, the platform itself is more unusable than ever. The search function doesn't work, they split posts and retweets into separate tabs for some reason, and they funnel you through the "For You" page, with an algorithm designed to show you posts that you'll get mad at and react to. I'm pretty vigilant about this stuff but even I've fallen into that trap many times.

The thing that finally did it for me last month was a video of Morant throwing down an absolutely incredible tomahawk dunk in a summer open gym run that made the rounds a couple of weeks ago. In this video, Morant's hand had seven fingers and his body proportions were totally off. Anybody with half a brain could look at it for two seconds and tell that it was entirely AI-generated. Yet I saw multiple big accounts with a lot of followers sharing it like it was a real clip. That made me feel like we're beyond saving, and I don't like feeling that way. So I bailed.

At this point, the downsides of being on there far outweigh any benefits. Ask yourself when the last time was that being on there made you happy or added something to your life. Then ask yourself when the last time you saw something on there that made you upset. I'll bet the latter is far more frequent than the former.

Social media is supposed to connect people and make it easier to find information and perspectives. In 2026, all it does is further isolate people into their own reality that may or may not have much to do with what's actually happening. And hitting "send" on any post on X isn't going to lead to anything good.

If every reporter and media outlet stopped posting on there, people might have to start reading full articles and listening to full podcasts episodes again to get information, instead of reacting to clips that exist to be reacted to.

If every professional athlete deleted their account, there would be one fewer place for people to DM them death threats when they lose a parlay.

If Braiden Bell deleted his account, there would have been no offensive old posts for someone to find and cost him his dream job, and the Blazers would know who will be doing play-by-play on TV for Wednesday's preseason opener.