Five Things To Watch: Portland Trail Blazers

The city of Portland is at a crossroads. With a new apartment complex on every block and thousands of new residents flocking to the land of fair trade coffee and cruelty-free, artisan baked goods, the battle between Old Portland and New Portland has Rip City searching for a new identity.

In an ironic twist of fate, as the City of Roses undergoes an extended facelift, so too does its basketball team. Gone is four-fifths of the starting lineup that won 50-plus games two seasons in a row. Gone are the guys who led the Rip City Uprising of the Middle McMillan Years.

What’s left in Portland after the scorched-earth summer of 2015? The short answer is not much. The long answer is that, just like the city itself, the future of the Trail Blazers is far from certain and full of potential.

Here are five things to watch with the Trail Blazers this season. 

1. The reception returning players will get at Moda Center

The season will be one of homecomings. The biggest will come on Nov. 11, when LaMarcus Aldridge and the new look (same look) San Antonio Spurs make their lone visit to Portland. There is a lot of back and forth over how Blazers fans should respond to L.A.’s return. I’m not one to tell people how to behave, but nine seasons is plenty of time to form an opinion on a player. Blazers fans have opinions on LaMarcus, and they will air those opinions when his name is called in player introductions.

Who knows how the game operations folks will respond? The word around the team is that they’re over it and moving on. Does that mean a 10-minute video montage of fadeaway jumpers, top-of-the-key jumpers and turn-around jumpers? Or does that mean that L.A. is just another opponent? That remains to be seen.

For my money, the player who will get the best welcome home reception will be Nicolas Batum. The Charlotte Hornets come to Portland on Jan. 29, and assuming that Batum hasn’t been traded to the Spurs by that point, he will get an extended ovation. Remember, of all the guys who left – which was practically everyone – Nic was the one who got traded.

Wesley Matthews, now in Dallas, also will get a big ovation, although it won’t be until the end of March since he already has been ruled out until Christmas. Robin Lopez, now in New York, will be welcomed back nicely as well. Basically everybody will get big cheers except for LaMarcus, and the reality is that nobody knows how LaMarcus will be greeted.

2. Who plays what position, and for how many minutes?

The Blazers have a full roster with only one guy who played consistent rotation minutes in Portland last season. Damian Lillard is that guy, and we’ll get to him. Aside from the starting point guard position, every part of the roster is up for grabs. Who will do the grabbing will be the ongoing narrative for the season.

It is my contention that C.J. McCollum will get the nod to start at shooting guard. Gerald Henderson might be a better defender, but it is unlikely that Henderson – acquired in the Batum trade and in the final year of his contract – is going to be a long-term member of the Trail Blazers.

I also like Meyers Leonard to start in the frontcourt, since the Blazers are invested in his future and it is possible that he simply needs minutes to finally reach something appropriating his potential. But Mason Plumlee and Ed Davis are more traditional front court players and Noah Vonleh could be very good.

Then there’s veteran center Chris Kaman. He’s still on the team and probably would like to play, even if he is basically the definition of an outlier on this roster.

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Don’t forget the big contract Al-Farouq Aminu signed. Or that Allen Crabbe and Maurice Harkless are both trying to stake their claim to NBA roster space. What about Pat Connaughton? What about Phil Pressey and Tim Frazier? Nothing is certain with regards to Portland’s roster. It should make for some interesting combinations and playing time allocation discussions if nothing else.

3. Which players make the jump?

The Blazers aren’t going to win many games this season, but winning games is not really the point. The point is to put together a young roster with high-potential talent that can compete with the top teams in the Western Conference within a season or two.  The roster as it currently stands can’t compete with Golden State and Houston. It probably can’t even compete with some of the teams in the West that are on the rise such as Utah or Minnesota, who are going to get a lot of preseason love. Or the Kings, who SheridanHoops’ Gambling Guru belives are the best bet in the preseason over/unders. 

But in the future, Portland can add bodies through the draft, which is what tanking is all about. And maybe – just maybe – GM Neil Olshey can pull off a miracle and land a mid-level free agent during next summer’s absolutely nuts free agency period.

However, free agency and the draft are far from sure things. If the Blazers are going to get back into the competition sphere of the West, a couple of the guys on the roster will have to make some significant improvement over the course of this season.

Mason Plumlee, Maurice Harkless and Noah Vonleh come to town from the teams that drafted them, hoping to avoid the journeyman life of the oft-traded young player – guys like Ed Davis and Al-Farouq Aminu. All of those guys can have a lasting impact with the Blazers, but they will have to earn it. Allen Crabbe, C.J. McCollum, and Meyers Leonard have achieved veteran status within the Blazers, but all three will have to improve if they want to stick around for the next stage.

4. What will the Damian Lillard Blazers be like?

The NBA is about superstars. Some guys become superstars on their own through the way they play or the way they carry themselves on or off the court. And some guys become superstars because they are the best player on a small-market team, and that team does everything it can to promote its best player across the rest of the league in an effort to raise the team’s overall profile. Damian Lillard has become a superstar using both techniques.

And now, with the entire roster basically turned over, Lillard is not only a superstar but also the unquestioned leader of the Blazers. Lillard has backed down from very little over his short NBA career. It is unlikely that he will shy away from being the focus of everything that happens with the Blazers – either good or bad – in the upcoming season. But it should be interesting to watch his continued development.

Since the last time the Blazers made the NBA Finals in 1992, Portland has had a string of team leaders, but it has often been leader by committee. Not anymore. The spotlight will be focused on Lillard, who received a five-year, $125 million contract extension this summer. If it goes well, he will be praised. If it goes poorly, most of the fault will be his in the eyes of people who decide whose fault it is when a season goes sideways.

Should Lillard delegate some of his leadership to one of the new guys or one of the guys he has shared the court with before this season, he will likely be eaten alive. There has never been a bigger season for Lillard than this one. Luckily, the overall expectations are not high.

5. How secure is coach Terry Stotts?

I would be willing to make a strong wager that coach Terry Stotts will not lose his job this season. That doesn’t mean Stotts is safe for the long term. It is his job to figure out all of the issues with playing time and rotations, and it is his job to decide how much of a premium he should put on winning. The Great Blazers Rebuild of 2015-16 is going to be in his hands.

Portland’s last rebuild started 10 years ago with the hiring of Nate McMillan. A good coach can turn around an NBA team in a season or two. If the Blazers want to avoid becoming a perennial doormat, they have to avoid the revolving door of coaches that plague many of the league’s worst teams.

Keeping Stotts in place should be a mutually desired goal, both by Stotts, because he won’t have to find a different place to work, and by management, since starting over with a new coach almost always means the initial rebuild has failed.

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Mike Acker writes From the Elbow, a Blazers column for the Willamette Week, Portland’s biggest alt weekly. He is the former editor and lead writer of the Rip City Project. You can follow him on Twitter.