The Portland Trail Blazers have concluded NBA Summer League for 2026. With no selections in the prior draft and a fairly-full roster, the Las Vegas tournament wasn’t expected to be a world-shaking affair for Portland. And it wasn’t. The Blazers accumulated a 2-3 record, playing a few close games in the process.
It’s hard to draw conclusions from a team comprised of members who, for the most part, won’t make the main roster, but a couple of impressions linger after the shouting is done.
Yang Hansen Still a Project
Blazers center
Yang Hansen, one of the darlings of last year’s Summer League after becoming the surprise selection of the 2025 NBA Draft, acquitted himself adequately. He averaged 13.0 points, 8.5 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.5 blocks in 24.4 minutes per game. He shot an impressive 56.8% from the floor and 44.4% from the three-point arc, the latter in limited attempts.
On the debit side of the ledger, Hansen averaged 4.3 turnovers against defenses that were nowhere near NBA-quality, 4.0 fouls against offensive players he should be able to impede.
The basic book on Portland’s young center appears to remain the same. When he’s in a situation where his size dominates and the game is not too fast for him, he looks great. As soon as the action speeds up or goes over his head, he’s far less effective.
The turnovers are the most disturbing part of the equation to me right now. Hansen is a connective player. He’s not going to be a dominant post center, nor a scoring superstar. His value lies precisely in his ability to facilitate team offense from a non-standard position. Not being able to read the floor and make effective decisions is a major detriment in that role.
As such, while I don’t hate what I’m seeing from Hansen, I don’t yet see how it applies either. The evolution needed from him is just as vast as it was last summer. That’s not a great sign.
What About the Pipeline?
Several of Portland’s Summer League players showed isolated moments of brilliance. Nobody stood out as a candidate to progress beyond training camp.
Again, that’s not a surprise, but it does bring up a concern. Normally these situations happen for mature, contending team whose rosters are so accomplished that no Summer League participants have a hope of cracking the rotation. That’s halfway true for the Blazers. Their roster is thick with higher-level players. But “mature” would be an overstatement and “contending” isn’t anywhere close to true.
Portland boasts three huge stars: Deni Avdija, Damian Lillard, and Ja Morant. All of them are on short-term contracts. Only Avdija is a serious, locked-down bet to stay, and that’s if the Blazers can convince him to do so. Within two years, all could be gone.
Surrounding those three, the Blazers have a couple great role-players in Jrue Holiday and Toumani Camara, veteran center Robert Williams III, plus an underlying layer of developing hopefuls in Shaedon Sharpe, Scoot Henderson, and Donovan Clingan. Of the latter three, only Clingan is guaranteed a position and playing time.
I don’t hate those names. It looks like a solid roster. But there’s not exactly a groundswell of talent looking to take the Blazers over the top in that group.
Put this all together and you have an interesting, short-term trio of stars at the top, a really nice group of role players underneath them, a speculative group of young hopefuls being crowded out by those stars and role players, and absolutely nobody in the pipeline beneath them.
This is not ideal.
If the Blazers are looking to make a serious run over the next couple of seasons their upper-level players should be established, complementary, and intimidating. None of those things are true. If the Blazers are in transition, planning to pivot in a couple years as their budding players emerge, Summer League should contain at least one or two serious threats to break out underneath that core of young roster members. Instead, there’s not even a pulse.
In short, Portland’s run through Vegas this July provided another reminder that I’m not sure exactly what this franchise is doing or where they’re headed. I guess we’ll get another glimpse if they make moves between now and training camp. Failing that, we’ll just have to say that the issue wasn’t that Summer League failed to change the narrative, more that there wasn’t much of a narrative to change to begin with.
