The Portland Trail Blazers finally have a young core worthy to build around but the distance between them and contention is still large. That’s the conclusion reached by Tim Bontemps and Kevin Pelton of ESPN as they detailed goals for all 30 NBA teams
in the coming year. They analysts broke up the league into tiers ranking everywhere from “all-in on a championship” to “all-in on nothing”.The Blazers ranked among five teams classified as “building around young cores”. Their companions were the Atlanta
Hawks, Detroit Pistons, Memphis Grizzlies, and San Antonio Spurs. The explanation of Portland’s position:
The Trail Blazers now have a large collection of young talent — Deni Avdija, Shaedon Sharpe, Scoot Henderson, Donovan Clingan and Yang Hansen are all under 25 — that they’re hoping to grow with after acquiring veterans Jrue Holiday and Damian Lillard this summer. It does remain unclear what shape the roster will take as that talent sorts itself out.
The authors seemed more bullish on the Spurs, Pistons, and Hawks than Portland. At least the Blazers graduated beyond the “two timelines” category just beneath, which included the Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Clippers, Los Angeles Lakers, Miami Heat, Dallas Mavericks, and Philadelphia 76ers. That’s not to say Portland is better than those teams, but a unifying direction has been missing in Rip City for a while now.
At the bottom of the list lie four teams in the “all-in on nothing” category: the Chicago Bulls, New Orleans Pelicans, Sacramento Kings, and Toronto Raptors. Somewhat embarrassingly, the Phoenix Suns sit below all of them, in a singular category described as “all-in on 2024”.
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