10 Thoughts After the Trail Blazers' First 10 Games

Through 10 games of the 2024-25 NBA season, the Trail Blazers are on pace for about 24 wins, right where most people thought they’d be.

Because round numbers are easy checkpoints, and because they’re coming off their first extended road trip of the season (a 1-3 trek that saw the returns of Robert Williams III and Shaedon Sharpe to the lineup), and about to kick off a week-long homestand, it feels like a good opportunity to take stock of a few things I’ve seen in the first 10 games, good and bad.

1. They’re “fun bad” instead of just bad

Everyone came into the season knowing the Blazers were going to be. They’re still in the early stages of a rebuild, playoffs aren’t a thought in anyone’s mind and they’d really like to have a shot at drafting Cooper Flagg in June. At 3-7 through their first 10 games, they’re well on their way to reaching that goal.

But they’re watchable, for the most part. They aren’t the worst team in the NBA. They aren’t even the worst team in the Western Conference (that would be Utah). Outside of the opening-night blowout loss to Golden State, which had basically no redeeming qualities, they’ve largely competed and stayed in games and not completely given up when they get down big. There are things to like within most of these games, when it comes to individual player development, which is the goal for a season like this. Two of their wins have come against the Zombie Pelicans, who are the early frontrunners to be this year’s 2023-24 Grizzlies with all the injuries they’re dealing with, but they also beat the Clippers (who are surprisingly decent) and nearly mounted a big comeback against the Suns last weekend.

You don’t feel like you’re wasting your time watching them, like you did for most of last season, especially when the injuries started to hit. There’s a lot of season left, so that could change. But for right now, this is exactly what you want in a season like this: being competitive and fun to watch while collecting lottery balls.

2. The promised faster pace is improved, but only slightly

Much was made during training camp of Chauncey Billups wanting the Blazers to play faster. I didn’t take it that seriously, because “We want to play faster” is the free space on the coach media-day press conference bingo card. It would be more notable if a coach said they didn’t want to play with more pace.

The good news is the pace has improved in the early going of this season, but only by a little bit. Portland ended last season 21st in the league in that category at 97.88 possessions per game. Through the first 10 games this year, they’re up to 17th, at 99.3 possessions per game. Still closer to middle-of-the-pack than where they’d like to be, but an improvement nonetheless.

“I would like to be in the top third [in pace],” Billups told us last week. “The way I feel about it, why be this young and play slow?”

3. The same is true of the defense

The Blazers are right around where they were last year on the defensive end of the floor—up to 21st in the league from 23rd, giving up 115.6 points per 100 possessions. They have the personnel to be better than that—a lot of long, versatile wings like Deni Avdija, Toumani Camara and Jerami Grant—but a lot of their players with the highest upside on that end are young and still learning.

One positive indicator, and not surprising for a team as big as them: Portland is allowing the fifth-fewest shot attempts at the rim, per Cleaning the Glass, and the second-fewest points in the paint at 42.3 per 100 possessions. Donovan Clingan is a big part of that. Robert Williams III will be too, as he gets re-integrated. That’s one area where they excel. But they’re also giving up the third-most three-point attempts per game and opponents are shooting 37.3 percent on them.

4. Scoot Henderson is still a mixed bag

If you were hoping for the big year-two leap building on a promising last six weeks of Henderson’s rookie season, it hasn’t come.

With Shaedon Sharpe missing most of training camp, Henderson had the opportunity to earn an opening-night starting spot. Camara grabbed that spot instead, pretty convincingly, while Henderson largely struggled.

There have been two games that I would describe as great end-to-end Scoot performances: the loss to New Orleans and the win over the Clippers. Beyond that, there are plenty of individual good plays—smart passes, strong finishes—surrounded by a lot of the same issues that plagued his rookie season. The finishing still isn’t consistent, and the shooting everywhere else on the floor has regressed, too. The turnovers are still a problem.

I’m not sure what Henderson is going to be in the NBA long-term. I don’t think anybody is. I still think there have been enough flashes that he can develop into a good rotation player. But it’s still very inconsistent and he’s a ways away from becoming what people thought he would be when he was the third overall pick.

5. Donovan Clingan is right on schedule

The Blazers’ other recent lottery pick, meanwhile, has been mostly as advertised as a rim protector. He’s blocking 12.4 percent of shots while he’s on the floor. He fouls a lot, as expected for a rookie big man, and he has a lot of work to do on the offensive end. How much he improves on that side of the ball will determine his ceiling as a prospect. But the things he was great at in college—blocking shots, rebounding, setting screens—he’s also been great at in the NBA, in his limited minutes.

6. Deni Avdija is still finding his way

It’s still hard to get a feel for how Avdija has been through his first 10 games in Portland. The shooting sticks out in a major way, not for good reasons. Last year in Washington, he shot a career-high 37.4 percent from deep; so far this year, he’s below 20 percent on threes. His finishing has also been by far the worst of his career—he’s shooting 48.1 percent at the rim, a number that’s been over 60 percent every other year of his career and over 70 percent in three of his first four seasons.

Despite that, he’s done a lot of other good things. What he brings as a defender and playmaker has been evident. Maybe this will change as Shaedon Sharpe continues to re-acclimate himself, but right now, I still can’t really make a case for taking Avdija out of the starting lineup. And the poor shooting is such an outlier from the rest of his career that you have to think it’s going to come back around at some point.

7. The backup forward rotation is still sorting itself out

With Camara, Avdija and Grant entrenched as starters, Billups has tried different combinations behind them. Kris Murray, Rayan Rupert and Jabari Walker have all seen time and all done some good things but none of them have firmly established themselves in a permanent rotation spot. In Robert Williams III’s first game back against Minnesota on Friday, Billups played him a little at power forward alongside Clingan.

Until the roster is clarified closer to the trade deadline (more on that in a bit), it’s going to continue to be a by-committee approach and largely dependent on matchups.

8. The 3-point shooting is a problem

Portland has the fifth-worst offense in the NBA (108.1 points per 100 possessions) and their lack of shooting is the biggest driver of that. In four of their seven losses thus far, they’ve made a single-digit amount of threes, including just four in the Oct. 28 loss at Sacramento. They’re shooting 32.5 threes per game, sixth-fewest in the league, and making just 32.9 percent of them (also the sixth-worst mark).

By and large, they don’t have the personnel for it, but even the players they do have who should be better shooters haven’t been hitting them. Anfernee Simons is making 31.7 percent of his threes. Jerami Grant, who shot over 40 percent from three in each of his first two seasons in Portland, is down to 34.2 percent on a career-high 7.5 attempts per game. Their only regular rotation player who’s shooting over 40 percent from three is Toumani Camara, and he’s doing it on relatively low volume (3.2 attempts per game). Kris Murray, Rayan Rupert and Dalano Banton are shooting it well but they aren’t playing consistent minutes. Duop Reath is also out of the rotation. Those guys could play more if they want to solve this specific problem, but you’d have to take those minutes away from somebody.

Short-term, it is what it is. They aren’t a good shooting team. Long-term, that is at the top of the list of things the front office needs to fix with the roster. You can’t win in the current NBA if you aren’t taking and making a lot of threes, and this team isn’t equipped to do that.

9. They needed Shaedon Sharpe and Robert Williams III back

Despite back-to-back losses, the Blazers’ latest four-game road trip ended on a positive note with the returns of Sharpe in San Antonio and Williams in Minnesota, who missed the beginning of the season and most of training camp with injuries.

Each of their season debuts couldn’t have gone much better than they did. Sharpe looked completely comfortable against the Spurs and didn’t force anything. And Williams was outright dominant in his first-half shift against the Timberwolves. They have different reasons for needing to play—Sharpe because he’s an integral part of the future, Williams because they need to showcase him for trade suitors—but they’ve both showed quickly why their returns were so important.

10. There’s still at least one move to make between now and the deadline

A lot of these rotation questions are going to sort themselves out in about three months. I don’t know who’s getting traded where—those talks don’t usually pick up until after Dec. 15, when players signed this summer become trade-eligible—but Joe Cronin still has moves to make.

Williams is the obvious one, if he can stay healthy. And if he keeps playing as well as he did in his season debut, he could have a real market for contenders needing another big. Grant and Matisse Thybulle will also come up a lot in trade talks, just as they have at every other point over the past year. We’ll get more into what that means, and what their markets might be, as we get closer to the deadline.

Based on what we’ve seen so far, I’m much less convinced Ayton or Simons will be shopped. Clingan isn’t at the point where he can play starter minutes yet and Ayton is perfectly suited to soak up those minutes until he is ready. And Henderson hasn’t been nearly good enough for them to feel comfortable moving on from Simons and handing him the keys fully. A lot can change before February but that’s my read on things right now.

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One more thing: I was very sad to hear the news on Friday that Brian Wheeler had died. I didn’t know him extraordinarily well, just here and there at games, but he was always great to me when we did cross paths and, for people my age and younger that grew up in Portland, he defined the era, through 2019. My parents didn’t have cable when I was growing up, so I listened to most games on the radio and know his calls well. Bill Schonely is obviously the all-time voice of the Trail Blazers, but Wheels is right there after that.

My other employer, Rip City Radio, put together a YouTube compilation of some of his best calls that you can check out below: