If you were in the market for turnovers, the 2025-26 Portland Trail Blazers had you covered.
If you needed a Jrue Holiday pocket pass getting picked off in traffic, they had those. If you needed a Scoot Henderson step out of bounds, they had those too. They had Jerami Grant coughing it up in the paint. They had Donovan Clingan offensive goaltends. They even had the ball getting stolen from Deni Avdija’s left hand dribble (and were all stocked up on the Shaedon Sharpe model, too).
They had offensive fouls. They had live-ball turnovers. They had dead-ball turnovers. They even had apple turnovers.
Well…they didn’t have apple turnovers, but they did lead the league in just about every other flavor.
There is no way to overstate just how bad the Blazers were at taking care of the ball last year. In a league that values every possession, Portland gripped them like hot sand.
According to [PBP stats](https://www.pbpstats.com/), the Blazers led the league in overall turnovers with 1418 last year; the next highest was Brooklyn with 1292, making the difference 126. To give you an idea of how wide of a gulf that was, if Brooklyn would have had 126 fewer turnovers last year, they would have gone from 2nd-worst in the league to 13th-best.
In a league of 30 teams, the Blazers somehow found a way to finish 31st. They were peerless in their ineptitude.
**I Don’t Even Know Where to Begin**
The evidence is overwhelming. Each turnover stat I look up makes the problem appear even worse. I went back ten years trying to find precedent, but all the reasonable comparisons are a bunch of basement dwellers with 17, 18, 29, 19, 20, 17, and 20 win seasons. The only team that wasn’t a total scum-sucking bottom feeder was the Blazers team from a year prior. They had 36 wins.
I guess we’ll start here: for every 100 possessions, the Blazers turned it over 17.1 times. In the past ten years, only one team has matched that rate, the ‘24-25 Utah Jazz, who only won 17 games. There just aren’t many teams who turned it over as much as the Blazers did and if they even came close, they certainly didn’t make it to the playoffs.
The details get even more gory when you look at live-ball turnovers, which are the worst of the worst. Not only do live ball turnovers leave an offensive possession empty, they also allow the opposition to attack a defense that isn’t set, leading to fast break opportunities and mismatches that make it much easier to score.
Per 100 possessions, the Blazers had 10.7 live-ball turnovers. In the past ten years, the next closest rate was 9.7. No other team has averaged 10, meanwhile last year’s Blazers were channeling their inner Nigel Tufnel and trying to crank it up to 11.
Generally speaking, the amount of live-ball turnovers a team commits on offense is correlated to the amount of fast break points they give up, so it’s not a huge surprise that the Blazers defense was fifth-worst in that regard at 16.6 per game. If the Blazers would’ve been league-average in the amount of fastbreak points they gave up last year, which was 15.2 per game, that one improvement would’ve been enough to vault their overall defensive rating into a top eight ranking.
It’s one thing for your offense to be bad, it’s a whole other thing for it to be so bad that it makes your defense worse too.
**Turnover on the Orient Express**
When it came to committing turnovers, the Blazers were like the classic Agatha Christie whodunnit: they were all guilty of the crime.
Last season, the league average turnover percentage was 12.7%. The list of Blazer players who exceeded that is vast and comprehensive enough that I’m just going to name the three who played more than 400 minutes and came in under that percentage: Jerami Grant (12.0%), Donovan Clingan (10.9%), and Caleb Love (10.8%). The other ten were over.
When it’s that bad across the board, it’s hard not to look for responsibility beyond the players on the court. During the Chauncey Billups years, the Blazers finished 24th, 23rd, 26th, and 29th in turnover percentage. Last year that pattern of regression made it to its ultimate destination, 30th.
Most of the Blazers veterans with experience on other teams had some of their worst turnover rates here in Portland. For Jerami Grant, last season was his worst in ten years, for Jrue Holiday it was his worst in nine years. Matisse Thybulle had his worst year ever and both of Deni’s years in Portland have been the worst of his career (although an increase in usage at least partially excuses his leap in turnovers).
Only Robert Williams has seen his turnover rate decrease as a Blazer, everyone else coughs it up more. The problem is organization-wide, top-to-bottom. Are the players at fault? Yes. But so are the coaches, the schemes, the management, the personnel decisions… heck, I might even go as far to blame the nutritionist, because you don’t become historically bad at something unless everything is the problem.
At least some change is on the horizon. Change is always a bit of a wildcard, but there are two of its agents who are familiar to Blazer fans: Damian Lillard and Jay Triano. That duo helped lead Blazer offenses that ranked 15th, 2nd, 8th, and 6th in Orating and 16th, 3rd, 10th, and 17th in TOV%. A big caveat to that is the four-season run started fourteen years ago with a pre-Achilles tear Dame in his youth, but still… they do offer a glimmer of hope.
**Other Reasons for Optimism**
Regarding turnovers, the main reason to think things will get better next season is that I fail to see how they could possibly get any worse. The Blazers hit rock bottom and dug so far deep into the Earth’s crust that they’re pushing through to the other side of the planet. The only way is up.
Another rationale fueling my optimism is that in spite of all their turnovers last season, the Blazers managed to finish with a winning record. Their defense was mid, when it could have been bad. Their offense was bad, when it could have been worse. In my opinion, turnovers were the biggest issue for the Blazers last season. I didn’t even mind the bad outside shooting, because of how often they collected offensive rebounds, but that’s analysis for another time…
More steady, veteran stewardship at the lead guard position should help with turnovers. A larger stable of proficient ball handlers to combat any injury issues, which plagued last season, should also help. Hopefully, none of our coaches are the subject of an FBI sting operation, either.
Add it all up and I believe the Blazers have a path out of the turnover problem that handicapped them last season. At the risk of tempting the fates, I’m certain they’ll at least improve.
Ultimately, the Blazers don’t need to reach league-average status overnight to see a tangible impact on the standings. If they can simply climb from the depths of “historically inept”, the downstream effects will provide a better foundation to build a winning season. I think the pieces are in place for a more disciplined brand of basketball. The 2025-26 campaign was a masterclass in how to beat yourself; here’s to hoping the upcoming season is a masterclass in how to beat your opponent.
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