Last night the Portland Trail Blazers played the first game of their 2025-26 preseason schedule, heralding the start of another year of Portland basketball. In honor of the event, we have this question from the Blazer’s Edge Mailbag.
Dave,
A personal question here. What are you looking forward to at the start of the new season? It doesn’t have to be deep analysis unless you want it to be. I just want to hear what excites you most about this year. Or is it still exciting? Looking forward to it.
Jon
It’s
a good question. It’s funny. Next year will be my 20th year doing this. Good God, that’s a long time. Brandon Roy was a rookie when I started. It seems like just yesterday. I can remember the Greg Oden draft clearly. I know exactly what I was doing when we heard about each of his major injuries too. I’ve been through the grief of Roy’s knees and the joy of Damian Lillard’s buzzer beaters. We were pretty much the first on LaMarcus Aldridge’s free agent departure. I was in the arena when Jusuf Nurkic broke his leg. I recall exactly the look, feel, and smell of my office the moment I heard the news that Paul Allen had died. I remember being at the coast–on my only vacation with my kids–when Damian Lillard made his trade demand. I had to stop everything and write about that. (I’ve learned I have to carry my laptop on trips.) I was in the same place, same beach, same house, when the Blazers re-signed Dame. Loss and excitement are imprinted on the floorboards there, plus a little frustration that the front office appears to be conspiring directly against me ever getting to relax and enjoy my children!
Over the years I’ve been on radio, TV, podcasts, Blazer broadcasts. It’s been a lot. A lot of fun too.
Prepping for the season this year, a realization hit me that comes every once in a while. Given my tenure here and the fact that I write almost every day, usually multiple times a day, nobody has penned more words about this franchise than I have. No newspaper reporter or media personality, no beat writer or analyst…neither locally or nationally. I never envisioned that happening, neither as a starry-eyed child watching the team nor as a budding writer seeing if he could do this. But here we are.
I say all this so you’ll understand the irony and humor in the following.
As I sat down last night to recap the opening game, I had a feeling I always have at the beginning of the year: “Do I really know how to do this? How the heck do you recap a game, let alone follow a season? How do you convey all of that energy, all the skill and talent, all the plays and intricacies?” Sitting down at a laptop I felt inadequate, clueless.
Then the action started and a wave of relief washed over me. I rediscovered what I always do as the grand scope of what we’re trying to accomplish gives way to the minute details happening on the floor: I don’t have to explain it. The players and coaches and front office are going to do that for us. All I have to do is relay what they’re showing. This isn’t about my brilliance or acumen. It’s about who’s fighting through picks versus getting stuck on them, about who’s seeing the floor and who’s late to the play, about what the players are trying to do together and/or how they’re falling apart. It’s all right there. They tell the story. At best I just help narrate it.
That narration is aided by fellow staff and readers, of course. It’s a big enterprise…daunting, in fact. Almost everyone who works on staff for more than a year starts to twitch with PTSD-like symptoms as each new regular season approaches. How many posts a day are we getting up? Aaaahhhhh! And we still can’t cover it all! YIKES! I’m not sure they know how we do it either.
But doing it connects all of us–staff, readers, and public alike–to stories and lives that are bigger than we are, something bigger than ourselves. Chances for that are becoming rarer in today’s world. I still believe that has value. So we keep doing it, year after year…letting other people tell the story, then trying to build bridges between those community-centering events and the consciousness of the people around us.
I’m always excited about that opportunity, even when I feel dwarfed by it, overwhelmed by it sometimes. That’s the feeling as I start each year: inadequacy and hope, mixed with a burning desire to see what happens.
I suppose I’ve learned to thrive on that feeling as the years have passed. Early on I hoped that the Blazers would win a championship soon. As I was talking to a colleague near the end of last season, I realized that in all the years I’ve written, the Blazers have never truly succeeded at, or near, that level. The best they ever did was getting swept out of the 2019 Western Conference Finals. Otherwise they’ve been mediocre or worse for the entire…tenure…of this…site.
I’ve never gotten to write about a truly successful team, at least not in the ultimate sense. But I feel like I’ve always written about a really important one: important for the sake of everyone around me who believes and wants and strives, if nothing else. If this were based on me wanting the Blazers to win like I used to, I suppose I would have quit long ago. But my expectation now is that something will happen that’s worth seeing–worth sharing too–and that we’ll be there to do it.
As the season gets underway, I’m ready to read what that “something” is. I’m as eager to witness it and talk about it as ever. I could name plenty of specific things it might be: this player breaking out or that one being traded. In reality, though, it doesn’t matter how the season goes as much as it matters that we’re here to talk about it together. That’s what I look forward to most.
Let’s open it up to all of you, though! What are you most looking forward to as the season starts? Share in the comment section below. And thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as we can!
