All the Times I Was Wrong About How Bad the 2024-25 Trail Blazers Would Be
With two weeks left in the season, a team that was supposed to be tanking is still alive in the play-in race.
After four straight losses, the Trail Blazers’ play-in dream finally appears to be over.
They’re not mathematically eliminated yet, but with seven games left in the regular season, they’re four and a half games back from the 10th-seeded Sacramento Kings. It’s not looking good.
But the fact that we’re now less than two weeks away from the end of the season and still talking about it is a massive upset. After all, you’ve been reading for almost a year, here and everywhere else, that this was going to be one of the worst teams in the NBA for the third year in a row.
That was the plan from the beginning. At last year’s lottery, the Blazers fell back three spots, from the fourth-worst record in the NBA to the seventh pick. They weren’t worried, because the real prize was the presumptive No. 1 pick in this year’s draft, Cooper Flagg, who has done nothing in his freshman season at Duke to dispel the idea that he’s a truly foundational prospect. The Blazers, mostly running back the same roster and coach that won 21 games last season, would be right there with the other tanking teams like Utah, Washington, Brooklyn and Charlotte.
If anyone in the organization tells you they thought this season would go any other way, they’re lying.
That goes for me, too. And I’ve got almost a year’s worth of columns to prove it.
I don’t like making too many predictions, because no one will give you credit for the ones you get right and everyone will bring up the ones you get wrong. But the Blazers, one year after trading Damian Lillard, with a coach in a contract year, no true star and more than incentive than ever to tank, being bad was such a no-brainer that I wasn’t even going out on a limb by writing it, over and over again between last summer and roughly a month ago.
The number of times I declared, matter-of-factly, that the Blazers would be one of the worst teams in the NBA, with the best odds at landing Flagg, is amusing to look back on now that they’ve improved their win total by (at least) 11 games.
