5 Questions for the Trail Blazers in 2025
Looking ahead to what I want to know about this new calendar year.
The Trail Blazers enter the calendar year of 2025 about where they expected to be this season. They’re 11-21, 13th in the Western Conference, have the sixth-worst record in the NBA and are well out of playoff contention.
This is an important year coming up for the franchise—not just finishing out this season and securing a high lottery pick, but some other big, existential questions about where things are headed, and some big changes potentially in store over the next 12 months.
Rather than make predictions, here are five questions that will define how 2025 turns out for the Blazers.
What is the market for the Blazers’ veterans, at the deadline or this summer?
Jerami Grant, Deandre Ayton, Anfernee Simons, Matisse Thybulle and Robert Williams III are all going to be involved in trade rumors that you’ll hear about over the next five weeks until the trade deadline, and the ones that aren’t moved by then, you’ll hear about again in July.
Teams are grappling with the restrictions of the new CBA, particularly teams in the second apron, which prevents you from combining salaries in a trade or taking back more money than you send out. It makes deals of any kind, particularly involving big salaries like Grant, Ayton or Simons, more complicated than they used to be.
But we’ve already seen a few trades—the Warriors picking up Dennis Schröder and the Lakers adding Dorian Finney-Smith. There will be other moves around the league before the deadline. Maybe not blockbusters involving Jimmy Butler or De’Aaron Fox, both the tier of guys below that, which is where some of the Blazers’ available players sit.
As the trade landscape evolves and front offices’ thinking shifts about who’s worth giving up what for, what the Blazers’ veterans are worth is going to be an important question for the future of the rebuild.
Sean Highkin
What kind of coach will the Blazers look for?
At this point, if the Blazers didn’t fire Chauncey Billups after the Memphis and Utah losses by 40-plus in the early part of the season, I think they’re probably going to just ride it out until April before parting ways. But, as we’ve covered many times, Billups is in the final year of his contract and the goals he has for his coaching career don’t align with where the organization currently is. I’m not breaking any news when I say it’s hard to picture him being back next season.
Once that move is made, I’ll be very curious what kind of coach they bring in to replace him. There are a lot of types of candidates they could look at. Will it be someone with previous NBA head coaching experience, like James Borrego or the newly available Mike Brown? Will they try to lure a big-name college coach like Alabama’s Nate Oats to the NBA? Will they go for an up-and-coming assistant on another NBA staff, like other rebuilding teams did this past cycle with Jordi Fernandez in Brooklyn and Charles Lee in Charlotte? Will they look to the international game (where assistant GM Mike Schmitz has as many connections as anyone) for an outside-the-box hire?
I don’t know the answer, but which way they go will be one of the most interesting storylines of this coming offseason.
Will there be any clarity on the future of ownership?
The last time the Blazers organization addressed the status of the franchise was in summer of 2022, when Jody Allen issued a rare public statement in light of Phil Knight’s offer to buy the team, reiterating that the Blazers and Seahawks are not for sale.
Since then, there hasn’t been anything new to report on the subject. We know that eventually, the team—and all of Paul Allen’s other assets—have to be sold because that’s in his will, but we don’t know if there’s a sell-by date, or how long the Vulcan group sees itself staying in charge. I would love to ask Jody Allen or Bert Kolde these questions myself, but they’ve never made themselves available to reporters.
I wonder if there will be any movement on that front this year. Will there be any bids that go public? Will we hear from ownership directly? How does the NBA league office see it?
What’s the plan if the lottery doesn’t go as hoped?
The Blazers have been in the lottery each of the last three seasons. In 2022, they had the sixth-best odds and moved back to the seventh pick. In 2023, they had the fifth-best odds and jumped up to the third pick. And last year, they had the fourth-best odds and fell back three spots to the seventh pick.
There’s too much of the season left to predict where they’ll finish in the race to the bottom, but it will be somewhere in that ballpark. If they land the No. 1 or No. 2 pick in the lottery and get Cooper Flagg or Dylan Harper, that may be the foundational star this rebuild still needs. That’s the dream scenario.
But what if they don’t get that lucky? What if they’re once again picking sixth or seventh?
Their two recent seventh overall picks, Shaedon Sharpe and Donovan Clingan, have both worked out pretty well so far, so falling back in the lottery isn’t a death sentence. But neither of those guys are the guy every rebuilding franchise is looking for—the Anthony Edwards or Paolo Banchero. The Blazers still need that guy, and getting one of the top two or three picks is the best way to have a chance to get one of those guys.
If they don’t have that kind of fortune, what’s the plan?
Will the goal of the 2025-26 season be playoffs?
And that brings me to the final question, and maybe the most important one. Will the Blazers still be in “development mode” (read: tanking) when training camp kicks off in September of 2025? Will it be another year of disregarding wins and losses as a measure of success?
That will probably depend on the lottery. This team isn’t good, but they do have a few guys (Sharpe, Clingan, Toumani Camara, Deni Avdija) who are both young and would be good complimentary players on teams actually trying to win something. If they get lucky enough to draft Flagg or Harper, it wouldn’t take that long to turn around the rest of the roster around those guys and decide to go for the play-in.
For all of your sake, I hope that’s what the goal of next season is. There can only be so many seasons in a row where everyone knows going in that the goal is to lose, before people start to check out. I’m already starting to see it.
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