Are the Trail Blazers Still a Young and Promising Team?

The Portland Trail Blazers have a reputation, at least among their fans if not across the NBA, as being one of the promising young teams trying to make their name in The Association. The key words there are “promising” and “young”.

Last night in one of our comment sections, Blazer’s Edge Reader WonReasley80 brought up an interesting point. (This is one of the reasons our comment sections are worth reading, by the way. There are always tidbits and observations to be had!) The issue was this:

I remember

reading multiple articles throughout the year ranking Portland’s young core behind Houston’s. After watching this [Rockets-Lakers] series, Idk if I’d take this core over ours.

I want to expand the observation into a general question. How promising and young do you think the Blazers are? Are they exiting their “young” phase and starting to get into the middle ground where performance matters as much as promise?

To make this easy, I’m going to list NBA teams by their average age crossed with minutes played. In other worse, we’re not talking about average roster age, but average age of the people who actually play. The numbers come courtesy of nbaage.com.

For our purposes, I’m going to list all teams with an average age/minutes played mark of 27 years old or younger. That’s going to include about 2/3 of the league, which may provide some perspective on how “young” the Blazers really are.

1. Washington Wizards 23.8 years
2. Brooklyn Nets 23.8 years
3. Charlotte Hornets 24.0 years
4. Utah Jazz 24.3 years
5. New Orleans Pelicans 24.4 years
6. Memphis Grizzlies 24.9 years
7. Orlando Magic 25.0 years
8. Toronto Raptors 25.1 years
9. Chicago Bulls 25.4 years
10. Atlanta Hawks 25.5 years
11. San Antonio Spurs 25.5 years
12. Oklahoma City Thunder 25.5 years
13. Portland Trail Blazers 25.6 years
14. Philadelphia 76ers 25.8 years
15. Detroit Pistons 26.4 years
16. Indiana Pacers 26.4 years
17. Dallas Mavericks 26.5 years
18. Houston Rockets 26.7 years
19. Miami Heat 26.7 years
20. Phoenix Suns 27.0 years

As you can see, the Blazers are far from the youngest team in the league on this scale. They’re the 6th-youngest team by average age, but 13th by minutes played and 14th by usage rate.

So here’s the question. Which teams in this “youngest” list are the Blazers clearly more promising than? Which of these teams do you favor Portland’s roster over?

Share your responses in the comments section of this post, and thanks again WonReasley for the prompt!