Portland Trail Blazers general manager Joe Cronin and colleagues have risen the ranks in CBS Sports’ biannual front office rankings by Sam Quinn, slotting in as the 19th best front office in the league. Cronin and Co. moved up four spots since the previous ranking in July 2025.
Quinn gives credit to Cronin’s big swings, including the Deni Avdija trade, and praises the ongoing returns of the Damian Lillard deal:
Several of Joe Cronin’s biggest moves are all looking great right now. The Deni Avdija trade?
An enormous victory. He’s an All-Star on one of the best contracts in the NBA. The Damian Lillard trade? Superb, in hindsight. Those Milwaukee picks are some of the best owed draft picks in basketball. Even moves that looked a bit shaky over the summer, like the Jrue Holiday trade, have mostly gone as planned. Holiday’s age and contract are still a concern, and he missed a lot of time earlier in the season, but he’s been spectacular when he’s been available. It says quite a bit about the state of the Blazers that, even if reports indicated that he was not interested, Portland was treated in some corners of the internet as a reasonable suitor for Giannis Antetokounmpo.
However, Quinn remains skeptical of the large sum owed to Blazer vets Jerami Grant, Lillard and Holiday. These concerns are made more urgent considering the Blazers’ need to re-sign Avdija in the coming years. Furthermore, Quinn casts doubt on the upside of Toumani Camara’s recent contract extension, citing a downturn in defensive production.
I remain somewhat concerned about the $88 million or so owed to Holiday, Lillard and Jerami Grant in 2028, especially now that Avdija has broken out. Portland will probably want to keep cap space open for the summer of 2027 in order to renegotiate and extend his contract before he becomes a free agent, and that’s going to mean avoiding further expenditures if they can’t move off of some of that money owed to older players. Shaedon Sharpe is living up to his extension thus far, but Toumani Camara hasn’t been quite as effective defensively after signing his own new deal.
This next offseason has the potential to catapult the Blazers further up the list, depending on how they use their stockpile of assets from the Damian Lillard deal.
