The Portland Trail Blazers have spent much of the 2024-25 season stuck in No Man’s Land. They’re too good to earn the best chances at high lottery picks in the 2025 NBA Draft, too fractured and inexperienced to make a run at the playoffs. That “neither fish nor fowl” nature extends to their off-court planning as well, as a hodgepodge of incumbent players and stars-in-waiting gum up the salary ledger, costing plenty of dollars but producing relatively few wins.
Frustration over Portland’s presence in the middle ground and a fervent desire to exit the neighborhood as soon as possible lie behind today’s Blazer’s Edge Mailbag question. Check it out:
Dave,
Do you see any hope of the Blazers gaining cap space anytime soon? Part of being a rebuilding team is also being an inexpensive team. We seem to have gotten that part wrong. It’s killing me that we don’t have cap space while players like Jerami Grant eat up salary. This has been a huge mistake in my opinion. How does it get cleared up?
Ryan
The Blazers are not going to be able to generate much flexibility this summer. They’re still in salary cap purgatory. Not hell. That would be the Phoenix Suns and the Philadelphia 76ers. But Portland is on the high end of the non-luxury-taxpayer scale, just below the tax threshold right now. They have relatively few free agents on their roster this summer, which means they don’t have to increase salary much and have potential for a little more clearance next season, but that’s because the cap ceiling is going up, not because Portland’s financial obligations are reducing. They’ll be capped up good next year as well.
This is annoying for fans. We want everything now, right away. If the team is going to rebuild, we want the process to go into overdrive: liquidate all veterans, acquire all the draft picks, get below the salary cap. Next year seems like forever away, two years from now too late.
Rebuilding is almost always a process, though. Sure, you have teams like the Washington Wizards who CTRL-ALT-DEL their roster into irrelevance and hope to leap forward with prime lottery picks. Sometimes it works. Philadelphia managed it pretty well before Joel Embiid went FUBAR. Just as often, it results in decade-long playoffs droughts that make waiting two years for the cap to clear seem like a cakewalk.
The Blazers haven’t dumped veterans at all costs...at least not yet.
Here’s your obligatory reminder that the official rebuild started in September of 2023 when Damian Lillard got traded to the Milwaukee Bucks. Only two mid-season trade deadlines and one summer have passed since then. Shifting from “build around Dame” mode (acquiring veteran contracts) and rebuild mode (divesting yourself of same) doesn’t happen overnight. The cap has a certain inertia, defined by the terms of the contracts already in house. Jerami Grant and Anfernee Simons didn’t just disappear when Lillard did. Neither did the money owed them, or the players acquired in exchange for Lillard. Had the Blazers made divestment trades, chances are at least some of the incoming contracts would have stretched to this point anyway, leaving them just as over the cap as they are now.
That inertia is still going, but it’s not going to last forever. Though few of Portland’s contracts expire this summer, the Summer of 2026 is a different deal. Right now Ayton, Simons, Robert Willians III, and Matisse Thybulle are all scheduled to become unrestricted free agents that year. Portland will also be dealing with a number of restricted free agent decisions for younger players in ‘26. Let’s assume they keep all of those restricted free agents, however. Let’s also assume a couple of draft picks added. Even with all that, Portland could be sitting, ballpark, around $120 million against a salary cap of $170 million. That’s plenty of cap space for their needs.
The caveat is, the Blazers would have to lose all four veteran players in order to generate that room. You can judge for yourself how much hold that experienced quartet has on the team. The cap space won’t be automatic. Every player they sign that summer—or extend prior—will eat into their potential room.
By the way, that number includes Grant’s $32-34 million salary staying on the books. He’s not likely to become a free agent until 2028.
In short, Portland is reaching a decision point that they have not faced prior. Up until now, letting go players like Simons and Grant—or trading Ayton or Williams—would have meant years without veterans and, unless the entire roster got nuked, wouldn’t have generated meaningful cap room anyway. That’s going to change now. The rest of Portland’s roster is growing towards their prime years. The cap space window is starting to open up, not years from now, but one summer away. Now the Blazers can decide whether they’re ready to launch into the next phase of the building project, trusting their younger players without the generation above them, and whether they want to create cap room to make unbalanced trades or sign free agents.
The front office may not make that leap. If they extend or re-sign current players, it’s going to be more of the same. But this is the first real opportunity they’ve had to opt for something different instead of some version of “more of the same, just worse, because no veterans while we wait”.
We haven’t really seen how Joe Cronin and company are going to play their hand up to this point. That was decided by Lillard and the circumstances/timing of the contracts around him. Abandoning ship or retaining no current players from the Dame Deal evidently weren’t palatable options for Portland. Now that a new one is opening up, we’re going to understand more about the minds behind the decisions we’ve seen, whether the outcomes we’ve experienced were considered ideal or whether decision-makers were simply making the best of a difficult situation.
If the Blazers extend the current roster, I guess we know that this was their Big Plan. If we see trades—or just waiting until next summer in relative silence without committing to new contracts—we’ll understand that Phase 1 of the rebuild is coming to a close and Phase 2 beginning.
Time is a funny thing. In ancient Greek, they had a few words to describe it. Among the most interesting were chronos and kairos. “Chronos” is chronological time, the kind that ticks by on your clock. It’s a measure of time passing. “Kairos” is the opportune time, the moment for action. Think of police on a stakeout. They wait for hours in a car watching a warehouse. That’s chronos, the movement of time chugging along. Then the people they’re surveilling turn up in an ice cream truck that they suspect is full of contraband. The cops go on alert, recording and documenting. That’s kairos, the moment of key opportunity, the appropriate juncture, the thing everybody’s been waiting for.
Up until now, the Blazers have mostly been wading through chronos since Lillard’s departure. They’ve been plenty active, but we haven’t seen signs of them shaping the roster into recognizable future form. Given the shape of the current roster and the contracts for same, we’re about to enter a kairos moment, at least for this stage in their development. Keep an eye out over the next few months to see which way the wind is blowing in Rip City. One way or another, we’re going to find out.
Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as we can!