Trail Blazers' Night Begins With Sudden Josh Hart Trade, Ends With Much-Needed Win Over Warriors

PORTLAND, Ore. — Less than 10 minutes before Wednesday night's tipoff, it became clear something was up.

In the lead-up to the trade deadline, no Trail Blazers player's name had been more prominent in trade rumors than Josh Hart. It was a virtual lock that their game against the Warriors, 17 hours before Thursday afternoon's trade deadline, would be his final game in a Portland uniform. He didn't even make it that far.

During the team's pregame warmups, Hart was pulled aside by a staffer and abruptly left the court, giving Damian Lillard a hug on the way back into the tunnel. Slowly, the players all crowded around the phone of Rick Riley, the team's director of security, presumably to read this tweet.

Around the same time, a member of the Blazers' media-relations staff walked over to public-address announcer Mark Mason and television commentators Kevin Calabro and Lamar Hurd, presumably to alert them that Gary Payton II would replace Hart in the starting lineup.

That's what it looks like when a player gets traded in real time. Now, you have a game to play. And the Blazers did something they haven't done a lot lately: went out and handled business against a team in their same tier of Western Conference play-in/playoff bubble hopefuls.

"I tripped on it for a little bit," Lillard said after the Blazers' 125-122 win over Golden State. "I was kind of like, 'Damn.' Even going into the tip, I wasn't thinking about it during the game, but I was sitting there thinking, I'm used to a certain substitution pattern or him being on the floor or things like that. I would have random moments of thinking about it. But like I said, we're just trained to go. We're professionals. At some point, you get lost in the game and you start playing."

Lillard overcame a rough shooting start to the game to put together just his second career triple-double, and Shaedon Sharpe, Jabari Walker and Trendon Watford took advantage of the sudden surplus of minutes with Hart out of the lineup.

We'll know more about what the rest of this team will look like in about 12 hours. Joe Cronin, who was sitting in his usual baseline seats with owner Jody Allen on Wednesday, still has work to do. Don't be surprised if the protected first-round pick the Blazers got in the trade goes elsewhere before noon tomorrow, perhaps attached to Jusuf Nurkic's contract to upgrade at the center position. It's foolish to evaluate any of these deals in a vacuum, with so many moving parts and so many hours to go before the final buzzer. 12 hours ago, the widespread expectation was for Utah's Jarred Vanderbilt to end up in Portland for a package centered around Justise Winslow and two second-round picks. That fell through when he was included in a reported three-team deal with the Lakers and Timberwolves. These things are often fluid, and deals that are on the table today may not be there tomorrow.

If swapping Hart for Cam Reddish, a former lottery pick who has struggled to find a consistent role now with two teams in four seasons, is the only move the Blazers make, it will run counter to what Chauncey Billups said two weeks ago—presumably speaking for the rest of the organization's decision-makers—was the goal for the season: to "make the playoffs and be dangerous." But I don't think it will be the only deal. It shouldn't be, anyway.

It's undoubtedly easier for players to process these abrupt changes after a win, but Hart was loved by his teammates. He was in Portland for almost exactly a year, coming over in last deadline's trade that sent C.J. McCollum to New Orleans. The highlight of his tenure here is a tossup between last year's "Barack Obama" 44-point performance in a win over the Wizards and his game-winning three in Miami on the first extended road trip in November. The issues with his willingness to shoot at times hampered what he brought on the offensive end, and probably doomed his long-term future in Portland with so many other long-term roster decisions to make. But his rebounding and infectious competitiveness on defense will be difficult to replace.

(A side note: I covered Tom Thibodeau for two years in Chicago, and no player has ever been more designed in a lab to be a "Thibs guy" than Hart.)

"Anytime that happens, it's tough," Lillard said. "He was a good dude. A good person. I know he liked being in Portland, he wanted to be in Portland. You want people to come here who want to be here, but the business takes over and it's unfortunate. It's part of the business. It's the thing I struggle with the most, but that's part of it. It's what we signed up for."

As Lillard was on his way down from the podium following his postgame press conference, word got out that the Raptors were closing in on a deal to reacquire Jakob Poeltl from San Antonio, five years after trading him to the Spurs for Kawhi Leonard. Lillard paused to get filled in on the deal by reporters who have Woj and Shams notifications turned on.

About 20 minutes later, after all the players had left and it was down to a few of us left in the media room, another trade was reported, one that will have a much greater impact on the Western Conference playoff picture this year and for the next several.

A hell of a night at the office for everyone involved.