[Portland Trail Blazers](http://www.blazersedge.com) small forward Deni Avdija has had a heck of a season on his current team, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t tough being traded from his old one.
[Josh Robbins of The Athletic](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6212140/2025/03/18/deni-avdija-wizards-trail-blazers-trade/) (subscription required) spoke with Avdija and those close to him about the trade that brought him from the Washington Wizards to Portland:
> The trade from Washington is not something the usually affable Avdija enjoys talking about. Before the 2023-24 regular season, he and the Wizards reached a rookie-scale contract extension, which kicked in this season, worth $55 million over four years. At the time he inked that extension, and for months afterward, Avdija considered his new deal as a vote of confidence in him, and rightly so. The draft-night trade stunned him — and hurt him. In an Instagram story that he posted shortly after the trade, he wrote: “Dc u will forever be in my heart” and included a broken-heart emoji.
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> When asked about the trade on Sunday, after the Blazers’ win over the Toronto Raptors, he said, “It was nighttime at my place (in Israel), and I woke up. I saw I got traded, and it was very hard for me. All the friendships that I had with the guys there, the city, the fans — it all just disappeared in a second. But everything’s for the good. I feel like I found a nice home in Portland.”
Avdija - averaging career-highs in points per game (15.3) and usage rate (22.2%) and one-tenth of a percentage point off his career high in true shooting percentage (59.6%) - has found his groove for a Portland team that has needed his young veteran leadership and his ability to make something out of nothing off the break.
> It took him a little while to adjust to a new team, but he found his groove... “We’ve let him have a lot more responsibility with the ball, and he keeps proving to get better and better at it,” Blazers coach Chauncey Billups said. “He’s like a one-man fast break when he gets the ball. Some of these things, I didn’t even know about when we got him, because we only played him twice a year, so I didn’t know that much. But he’s been a pleasant surprise. The fire that he plays with, I think, takes our team to another level. The edge that he plays with, the toughness that he plays with — we need it.”
The Blazers’ best player for stretches of this season, Avdija has three more guaranteed years on a descending $55M contract he signed in Washington that will see him paid $14.3M next year, $13.1M the year after, and $11.8M for the 2027-28 season.