The Portland Trail Blazers are struggling to find their identity during the 2025-26 season. Are they a playoffs team or a lottery team? Are they old or young? Do they rely on the lane or the three-point arc for their offense? Depending on the game and the angle from which you’re viewing, a credible answer could be found on either end of any of those spectra. And most of the places in between!
Injuries have played a huge part in the confusion. How the Trail Blazers play has been predicated, in large
part, by who is on the floor. Yesterday we fielded a Blazer’s Edge Mailbag question asking why the team was so complacent about the slow-down, isolation-based offense they’ve been playing lately. I offered that they didn’t have many choices with Jerami Grant and Jrue Holiday as their only multifaceted veteran scorers.
At the tail end of that question, its author opined that Scoot Henderson might be one of the answers to Portland’s woes, now that he’s fully back from injury. This accompanies a chorus of voices in the Mailbag and our Game Day Threads advocating for Scoot to start and continue his developmental journey.
On the surface the suggestion makes sense. Scoot is quick. He can push the offense. He gets into the lane and is capable of passing out of it. In theory, he can be a big scoring threat. If you want a firecracker to break up the complacency of an otherwise-staid offense (and if Deni Avdija is injured), Scoot is the most likely member of the roster to serve.
So why isn’t Henderson starting in a situation that appears tailor-made for his gifts? The distance between theory and reality is still vast. It just doesn’t look like Scoot is ready.
The best way to frame it, at least for myself, is that Scoot looks like a rookie out there. I am NOT saying that Scoot looks like Scoot Henderson as a rookie. He has made enormous progress since his first year in the league. Full credit there! His shot selection is much better. Reading the court has solidified. He’s down for defense. His three-point shot is much less random. I have been impressed with his growth and continue to be.
For all that, Henderson still resembles an NBA rookie. A big part of that is a timing thing. You can see it most clearly in his passes. They’re often too hard or just a bit off target. He’s able to use space, but he’s not comfortable in it and not delivering through it with the surety of an experienced player.
On offense, particularly, Scoot and the gang are like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons—one guy clearly apart from the others, playing his own game—except Frankie isn’t quite in tune with the rest.
Granted, some of this is because these players have never suited up together as a unit, with Scoot being out most of the year. But Jrue Holiday also missed time and hadn’t played with any of his teammates before the season started. He looked pristine from the get-go. I don’t expect Scoot to resemble one of the greatest team-oriented point guards of this generation, but three seasons into his career, I do expect him to be north of Blake Wesley by a mile. He’s just not.
Playing off-ball more was supposed to extend Scoot’s shelf life on the floor, but two things are interfering.
When he’s playing alongside another ball-dominant guard, Henderson is fading. It’s the classic “either-or/my turn-your turn” offense, where receiving the ball activates Henderson into Scoot Mode, which may or may not fit with the other things going on around him. That’s forgivable. Henderson isn’t the only guard—not even the only guard on the Blazers—to suffer from that malady.
The unforgivable sin is that Scoot’s not hitting shots. In his ten games back, he’s had just three shooting better than 40% from the field. Two of those encompassed his only decent three-point shooting efforts: 3 of 5 versus the Minnesota Timberwolves on February 11th and 2 of 4 versus the Utah Jazz on February 12th. Other than that one, 48-hour period (nearly a month ago now), Scoot has been abysmal. Six of his ten outings have featured either 0 or 1 three-pointer hit, 25% shooting or below beyond the arc. His aggregate shooting since he returned: 39% from the field, 24% from distance. The team as a whole averages 45% and 34%.
Henderson’s assists have been passable. (Hmmm…see what I did there?) He’s at 4.7 in 23 minutes per game, making 7.3 assists per 36 minutes. That would leave him right around 19th in the NBA if he could do it for a full season, in a fairly-close deadlock with his teammate Avdija. Unfortunately his turnover rate of 3.1 puts him at 4.8 per-36. That’s also on par with Avdija, who is one of the most turnover-prone ballhandlers in the league. Henderson certainly has Avdija’s aptitude for attacking the lane and looking for the kickout, but also corresponding flaws.
So basically, at least since he’s been back, Henderson has looked a bit like a mini-version of Deni Avdija, without the scoring, shooting, or full defensive ability. The problems are two. First, those latter attributes are a large part of what makes Deni special. Second, the Blazers already have one Avdija. They probably don’t need two.
Here’s the tantalizing part. Showing any of these characteristics is a positive sign. Deni Avdija wasn’t fully Deni Avdija until this season, his sixth in the NBA. It took experience, reps, and free license with the ball to bring out the All-Star version of Portland’s shiny point-forward. Henderson is only in his third year. He has time.
Here’s the hard part. Scoot’s sixth season is not today and is not coming soon. We can’t argue for him to play—let alone captain the offense—on what he might become. We certainly can’t argue that his current performance justifies starting him or even giving him a bigger role than he has now. If the Blazers had a better alternative (which is not hard to imagine if Avdija and Holiday are both healthy) it would be easy to see Scoot’s looks go down. Given his potential and status with the team, I don’t believe he’d ever be benched wholly. But he’s a long way from being essential to this lineup, except in its currently-decimated status.
In short, Scoot advocates aren’t wrong, but he’s not able to perform at a level yet that would justify expanding his current role. He’s not even the answer in most of the possessions he plays, let alone for the team’s ills as a whole. That will have to wait for another day and, likely, another season. The Blazers will ride this one out as they have the past two, considering anything Henderson gives them as a bonus, waiting still for the true breakout that his promise portends.
