Editor’s Note: Corrected point totals for both Anfernee Simons and Deni Avdija in opening paragraph.
The Portland Trail Blazers defeated Damian Lillard and the Milwaukee Bucks on Tuesday, 125-112, behind 30 points from Deni Avdija and 25 points from Anfernee Simons.
Pack it up, everybody. This was the only game that mattered this season. As far as any Trail Blazers fan can be concerned, Portland are undefeated. Against Milwaukee, that is. Overall, the Trail Blazers are now 18-29, and have won five of their last six and they are just four wins away from surpassing the Vegas odd makers’ preseason line of 21.5 wins.
If you recall my preseason predictions, I overshot that line by a healthy margin, foretelling that Trail Blazers were going to win 27 games, go 20-32 before the All-Star Break and then end up last in the Western Conference. I also said that none of this actually portends to any insight; these are all the predictions of a diehard fan playing Nostradamus. I know nothing.
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Moreover, the lede has been buried: the Trail Blazers have outperformed their expected win-loss record by four wins, good for first among all teams. Expected win-loss, for those curious, is a Pythagorean theory of predicting wins and losses based on points scored and allowed as a logistic regression model.
I have no idea what those last words even mean—well-played, nerds, you found another statistic to help shape the argument and start the MENSA barfight1—but when comparing Portland’s Pythagorean record of 14-33 with their actual record of 18-29, one can see that the Trail Blazers have evolved into a team that frustrates mathematics with exquisite deliciousness.
They probably also frustrate observers who just want them to acquire a higher draft pick. Of the other tanking teams that exist in the league (in descending order: Chicago, Toronto, Brooklyn, Charlotte, New Orleans, Utah, Washington), Portland currently sits with the seventh worst record. Only Chicago has won more. Were the draft held tomorrow and the Trail Blazers given the seventh pick straight-up, Tankathon has them selecting swingman Kon Knueppel from Duke.
While a phenomenal shooter with size that would address an immediate need for the Trail Blazers, this is a long ways away from Cooper Flagg, the unanimous object of affection in a draft deep with guard/wing talent. For teams like the Washington Wizards and the Utah Jazz, the mantra “Capture the Flagg” is a reason for suffering through some of the worst seasons in the history of the National Basketball Association. That’s not a joke.
The Wizards have six wins. Six. Wins. The Jazz have ten. The Trail Blazers have probably already lost those races to the bottom. But, that does not mean Portland does not have ways to cut some parachute cords and land with a sickening, bloody thud nearer to the bottom.
First, the trade deadline is coming up, and Anfernee Simons and Jerami Grant, despite poorer play this season, still hold practical utility of teams. Simons makes for a sensible fit with Orlando or Detroit, and Grant can fit on just about any contending team that has space. There’s not many of those (read: probably one or two), but with the recent news of big-names like Jimmy Butler, Bradley Beal and De’Aaron Fox all on the trade block, the money involved with Grant could very well facilitate these transactions.
Second, Portland’s ability to just sit everybody and call up the G-Leaguers is nothing to snear at. After beating Milwaukee this time last year for their 15th victory of the 2023-24 season, the Trail Blazers proceeded to post just six wins over their last 34 games. In 2022-23, the last season with Damian Lillard, the Trail Blazers tallied just five wins in their last 26 games. And in 2021-22, Portland put together a doozy of a deuce of wins in their last 21.
The Trail Blazers can tank with the best of them. Run from it, hide from it, embrace it all the same, the organization knows which way the wind blows and has done a stellar job of stacking up losses after the All-Star break. If Chauncey Billups wants to continue to showcase Simons and Grant, that’s Joe Cronin’s problem to solve.
There are limits, however, to this argument. Whereas dawdling on dreams of trade machines or karmic retribution can be cathartic, it also doesn’t stack up to the hard-cold numbers. It is undeniable that the Jazz and Wizards are placing themselves in the best mathematical position to acquire Flagg or Harper or Bailey or whoever the hell else is lighting up the amateur leagues right now.
And yet, the math does not always bear that out. It bears repeating that the draft position one has at the end of the season among the worst teams is due entirely to probability, not records or head-to-head match-ups or some strength-of-schedule screw-balling. Being bottom-three bad doesn’t guarantee a top-three pick.
It’s not so crazy. Just last year, Atlanta won the 2024 lottery with the 10th worst record and a 3% chance at the top pick. New Orleans won the 2019 lottery with the 7th worst record and a 6% chance after the flattening off the odds among. Even before the NBA draft lottery odds were flattened in 2019, Cavaliers won three lotteries in four years with a 1.7% chance in 2014 and a 2.8% chance in 2011. The Chicago Bulls also won the 2008 top spot with a 1.7% chance.
The Trail Blazers, as anyone will remember, won the lottery in 2007 with a 5.3% chance after finishing 33-49 and watching some absolutely brilliant flashes of play from a promising young duo in Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge. So it’s not unfeasible to still win the whole dance while still winning more games than expected. And that’s without even discussing the different ways that teams can still move up or slide down into the other 13 lottery positions.
It’s as not as do or die as sports talk radio will make one believe.
The depth of the 2025 draft means that there’s still plenty of prospects with star potential after Cooper Flagg. Rutgers’ duo of Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey are often termed as consolation prizes, but their offensive games are enough to be star players in their own right. Then there’s the possibility of guards VJ Edgecombe, Tre Johnson, Jeremiah Fears or Kasparas Jakucionis, who could bolster the guard rotation with a different look than Anfernee Simons.
And yet that same depth has led to a sort of selective amnesia of what’s still in the cupboards; the Trail Blazers have already found some great future pieces through drafts and trades. At risk of sounding like the eternal optimist, Portland still has three lottery picks currently learning how to seize the moment in Shaedon Sharpe, Scoot Henderson and Donovan Clingan. They traded for two brilliant young forwards in Camara and Avdija. All five of these guys are still discovering the upper extremities of their abilities.
If the Trail Blazers continue to win, that means they have figured something out. It means that, after having sat or traded the veterans, any one of the young core has learned how to seize the moment and put a team on their shoulders.
That’s a phenomenal outcome, the kind of outcome one hopes for when they draft Cooper Flagg or Dylan Harper or Ace Bailey. If Portland already has that player waiting in the wings, then adding top-end talent is not insignificant. But once again, it’s not absolutely crucial. And in the interest of cautioning hope, in tempering expectations, the youth still has to prove their worth as star players before they are considered star players.
But condemning them to live out another season of abject misery is no better a sentence, and possibly just as damaging to their development as players.2
So let’s say the team really gels together, and Portland is looking at a 24-31 record by the All-Star Break. Or, hell, let’s just say the team switches to the promised core of Henderson-Sharpe-Avdija-Camara-Clingan, sidelining all the veterans and still wins north of 25 games before March is through, condemning themselves to the middle of the lottery when so many tantalizing prospects are within reach.
What to do? Panic?!
Nope. Take a breath. Enjoy the wins. Forget about all the hype and hooplah that exists outside of the Portland Trail Blazers and remember Ram Dass: “be here now.”
As a rule of thumb for being here now, what happens in the lower of levels of basketball does not interest me.3 Cooper Flagg does not interest me. Even the National Basketball Association, largely, does not interest me. There’s too many fuckin’ games to keep track of, to be honest. But for 82 of those games, the Portland Trail Blazers interest me.
And watching them go out there and win and develop players enthuses me. Regardless of starting lineups or opponent strength or whatever backwards reward system exists for being a horrifically incompetent or even maliciously compliant team.4
That’s why it’s so important to just stop. Take a breath. And enjoy every last one of these wins.
The Trail Blazers were expected to be downright awful this year. They were predicted to have the third-worst record before the season even began. If the team is gelling right now, if the younglings are learning how to impact games, and if they are outperforming expected wins and losses, then there is truly no better gift as a fan who was otherwise expecting the worst. Be present and enjoy that feeling.
We can worry about the odds on draft lottery day, the only day that they matter.
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1 I can picture it now. Warm non-alcoholic beverages flying. A heated discussion of IQ. And a firm rebuke that knowing about quantum mechanics hardly makes someone an expert of logistic regression models, or basketball.
2 As another rule of thumb, I let players show me who they are without judgment until it’s time to discuss the second contract.
3 I only go so far to watch some gametape and listen to what professional scouts say about their games. I have no time to spend watching basketball game after basketball game. I’m writing short stories like a madman right now.
4 I have a whole other post brewing about why flattening the odds for the 14 worst teams and stripping playoff-possible teams of their draft picks when they intentionally sit players during the playoff race is just a better system. In the context of this post, it’s a hypothetical solution to what has largely been a moral argument.
The Casual Ramble 