Do the Trail Blazers Have an 'Alpha' Problem?

Last night, the Trail Blazers almost came back from down 18 to beat one of the three teams in the NBA with a worse record than theirs.

It came down to the final possession, which would have given them their first lead of the night against Washington. Jerami Grant missed a driving layup attempt on a play Chauncey Billups initially drew up for Anfernee Simons—the same play that had gotten Simons a dunk on the previous possession to cut the Wizards’ lead to one.

Simons had 41 points on the night, 22 of which came in a dominant fourth quarter that powered the comeback. Two nights after he put away a game against the Suns with a big-time late floater, many wondered why he didn’t get the last shot against the Wizards. Was it Grant’s fault for breaking the play? Was it Simons’ fault for deferring? Was it Billups’ fault, like everything usually finds a way to be?

Billups’ line at his postgame press conference about the Blazers not having an “alpha” personality, which predictably has gone semi-viral, wasn’t about that final play. It was in response to a question about how they can get off to faster starts.

“On the offensive side, you want to start games and get the ball moving,” Billups said. “We don't have an 'alpha'-type dude on our team. It just is what it is. We've got some helluva players, guys that are going to be All-Stars in this league. But right now, we don't have that dude that you can throw it to and he'll get us going for the first four or five minutes of the game. We just don't have that. So we've got to do it collectively.”

It was an answer in line with something else he said following Tuesday’s win over the Suns, after I asked him if he knew why his team consistently came out flat to start games. Because they won the game, that answer got a little less attention and didn’t trigger the online outrage cycle, but it’s a better illustration of the same point.

“We have a lot of cool dudes who try to ‘cool’ their way into the game, and that hurts us,” Billups said after the win over Phoenix. “I try to talk to them about that all the time. We want to have a hit-first mentality. I like to act instead of react. I feel like we react to the room a lot of times.”

I tend to roll my eyes at most uses of “Alpha” language in sports. I covered the “Three Alphas” team in Chicago with Rajon Rondo, Jimmy Butler and Dwyane Wade, and that self-given nickname quickly became a running joke among fans and media members when that team predictably wasn’t very good. Since then, I can’t take that term seriously.

But Billups isn’t wrong that the post-Damian Lillard Blazers don’t have that kind of prototypically dominant personality who’s also a featured scorer.

Simons is, by his own admission, still feeling his way into a leadership role. Grant is one of the most mild-mannered people I’ve covered—certainly confident and secure in himself, but not a loud guy, on or off the court. Shaedon Sharpe (who is currently out with a hip injury) has the talent to fill that role but he’s still finding his voice. Toumani Camara has the on-court edge and has made his bones picking up the other team’s best scorer, but at this point in his development isn’t an offensive player. Deandre Ayton’s assertiveness comes and goes.

One day, maybe it will be Scoot Henderson. Right now, he isn’t ready for it.

These are standard-issue Rebuilding Team Problems. Thursday night’s loss to Washington was their 27th game of the year, exactly a third of the way into an 82-game season. All things considered, the Blazers feel better about where they are than most of the other teams in their part of the standings. The Wizards team that beat them is in the first year of a brand-new front-office regime and doesn’t have a lot going for it besides this year’s lottery pick, Bilal Coulibaly. Detroit just lost its 25th game in a row, five away from the all-time longest losing streak.

By comparison, by both talent and identity, the Blazers are much further along. But things like the late-game pecking order and early-game consistency are still very much a work in progress.

“We left a lot of meat on the bone as far as our record is concerned,” Billups said before the Wizards game when I asked him how he’s feeling about the team’s progress at that checkpoint. “A lot of the games that I thought we could have won. But you look at it and say, they're so young, how could they win those consistently? For me, it's trying to build the right type of culture and build the way that we're going to play going forward. And it's going great. I feel like we all understand how we want to play. We're a defensive team that's learning how to score and play offense. That's how we're trying to build it. And I don't think there's any confusion about that for any of our guys.”

For what it’s worth, Simons didn’t seem to take much offense to Billups’ comments and said it’s his responsibility to step into that role.

“I felt like, today I was trying to get us going a little bit,” Simons said. “They were giving me that pick-and-roll three early in the game, I just couldn’t knock them down. I was getting to the rim. That just took away … obviously, we were struggling offensively and defensively at the time, too. Those kinds of shots can deflate the team sometimes if you’re not making them. I was just trying to figure out reading the game and what we needed at the time, especially when we were coming out flat. Do I need to get everybody involved, or set the tone myself and go be aggressive myself?”

That’s something that’s going to be figured out as the season progresses. That there’s this much debate and outrage about a loss in a season everyone went into knowing the losses would be coming is a sign that the right people care, which is a lot of the battle for teams like this.