The Portland Trail Blazers are currently considered a team on the rise in the NBA, at least casually. Portland’s 36 wins in their 2024-25 campaign beat their previous year’s total by 15. The Blazers field a roster full of young players, many highly-drafted, whose future inspires hope. If you want to find reasons to look on the franchise with a sunny disposition, you probably can.
Not the author of today’s Blazer’s Edge Mailbag question, however! Adding 71% to the win total season over season is not enough for him. Instead he inquires about a different matter: the bungles the franchise has made over the past few years. Check it out.
Dear Dave,
I hope this letter finds you well. Better than the Blazers at least. But that’s not hard is it? You’re an eternal optimist and you’re always going to take the best outlook on things but I’m going to ask a question even you can’t squirm out of. What are the dumbest moves made by the Blazers over the past 4-5 years? More or less under [General Manager Joe] Cronin’s supervision. Give it to us. What moves would you take back if you could?
Dan
Eternal optimist? I should show you the emails I get characterizing me as Satan incarnate because I don’t praise every move the organization makes and each dribble from individual players besides. This is the nature of the job, though. No matter what you write, some people will call it knee-jerk negative and others pollyanna-positive. I guess as long as there’s some of each, I’m good. So yay! Optimism it is!
As far as your question, it’d depend on how you define “dumb”. It’s a negative term. We know that much. But it also implies exercise of intellect and will. Those are sometimes governed in the NBA. Otherwise we’d all have the smarts to discern that the Blazers should trade for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokic and then they’d go out and do it. The fact that they aren’t making those deals doesn’t mean that they’re dumb or unaware. They can’t. That’s true of many possibilities. Sometimes a relatively dumb move was actually the best, or only, one possible at the time.
Let’s take a side trip into a scenario I’ve been thinking about for a while now. It’s peripheral to this question, but I’m curious what you all think of it.
Let’s say a coach had his team in the playoffs. The opponent is vastly superior. The coach’s team only has a 4% chance of winning the game. But this guy is a mad genius and he has a scheme that will take his team’s odds to 9%, more than doubling them! But this scheme is so odd that it’s going to draw attention. (Think starting all 6’3 or under players while benching the team’s star or something like that.) Would this coach actually dare to implement the scheme?
In a pure sense, you’d argue yes. 4% to 9% is an obvious improvement. His job is to give his team the best chance to win. This does it. That he even thought of the scheme is a testimony to his genius. He’s more than fulfilling his purpose as a coach by sending his players out there to execute it.
In a practical sense, our coach would need Ostrich-sized huevos to even try it. A 9% success rate still leaves a 91% probability that his team is going to lose. And when that 91% probability happens, media, fans, and maybe his own organization will all put the blame squarely on him and his hare-brained game plan. It looked way different. It resulted in a loss. That’s enough to cause us to blame the loss squarely on the scheme and the coach who designed it. Our genius coach might even get fired, not because he was a bad coach—he was actually the best—but because the line between our perception of smart and dumb is pretty thin and almost wholly based on results. In this scenario, we’d call the most brilliant, daring adjustment ever devised ridiculous and stupid.
In that sense we should take our judgments with a grain of salt. Sometimes every move will look dumb in professional sports. We can’t always find the answer we want. All you can do is make the best decisions you can under the circumstances and hope that a new decision set down the road will bring more favorable odds.
So now, if you’re talking purely negative results, then the “dumbest” move the Blazers made in the last five years was trading away Damian Lillard. That plunged the franchise from charismatic near-mediocrity (with a shade of hope for more) into a full-on rebuild that they still haven’t escaped from. No single transaction has cost more wins, or goodwill, than that one.
One could argue, though, that Portland’s hands were tied with that trade. Lillard was looking to force himself out. The Blazers didn’t have a ton of options, short of starting a civil war with the face of their franchise. They took what they could get.
We should probably limit “dumbest” to situations where the Blazers got to exercise their free will, or at least a good portion of it. By that definition, I can think of two scenarios which might end up being described as dumb.
One that has been much-ballyhooed this year was signing Jerami Grant to a five-year, $160 million contract, starting in the 2023-24 season. Grant is currently averaging over $30 million per year in salary while shooting less than 38% from the field. But he was 28 years old at the time of the signing. There wasn’t any reason to suspect that his statistical production would plummet as far as it has this season. If he rebounds into his old form, that contract is going to look better. If not, though, the Blazers bought themselves a cap brick and not much else besides inconvenience as they tried to rebuild.
The other potentially dumb move was selecting Scoot Henderson third overall in the 2023 NBA Draft. The Blazers couldn’t have gotten league-defining super-center Victor Wembanyama, but couple of guys named Thompson went right after Scoot who seem to be playing pretty well for their teams so far. But nothing from this draft—including Henderson’s career—is set in stone yet. We’ll need to see how it all plays out before pronouncing this a mistake.
And that’s how it will be while the Blazers are in limbo. All of their moves might prove fruitless. But even the ones that don’t seem to be working right now still have a chance.
This is part of why—optimistic or pessimistic—you’ll find me reticent to term a decision “dumb” outright. I have a couple of times. (I’m looking at you, Shawn Kemp trade.) But most moves can’t be declared dumb with any certainty until hindsight makes the declaration obvious already. We learn more by trying to understand why the move made sense in context and, if it doesn’t work, how to read that context better next time, if applicable.
Most people who rise to high decision-making positions in professional sports aren’t dumb. Even the smartest executives have to compete with their peers for a handful of transformational transactions. If they don’t get those done, ending up looking smart is exponentially harder. Sometimes all you can do is swing at the pitch in front of you and hope. That’s not smart or dumb. That’s just the way the game works.
But what about all of you? What would you term the Blazers’ “dumbest” move over the past few seasons? Share in the comments section below!
Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as possible!