The Portland Trail Blazers appear to be looking up during their 2025-26 season. They’ll be competing in the NBA Play-In Tournament for the first time ever, hoping to return to the NBA Playoffs for the first time since 2021. But the road hasn’t been easy and no summits have been topped yet.
That’s frustrating at least one Portland fan who offered this submission to the Blazer’s Edge Mailbag. Admittedly, this was submitted 10 days ago or so, but I feel better answering it now than I would have then.
Take a look.
Dave,
How do you handle all the disappointment and all the losing? I swear if I see another blown lead or another blown play or another stupid loss when we should be making the playoffs I’m going to scream. This is the hardest part of being a Blazers fan. I’ve done it for year and I’m not sure how much more I can take.
A Long Time Season Ticket Holder
One of the great things about sports, ALTSTH, is that tomorrow is always another day. Since you wrote this question the Blazers have prevailed in a really nice game in Minnesota, had a big-margin win against Brooklyn, and even posted a couple more W’s. They’ve assured themselves of a chance at the Play-In. They’re going to fight for the chance to make the playoffs with just one win. If everything goes right, Portland’s game against the Los Angeles Clippers one week from today should be huge, meaningful, everything you’d want out of a late-season contest. There’s ALWAYS a bounce-back. And you’re going to be there for it.
Heck, I almost died two years ago of a heart attack. In fact, I was dead on my kitchen floor. My son’s perseverance and my daughter’s quick thinking remotely calling paramedics were the only things that brought me back. And yet here I am, happy and healthy, fit and handsome as hell, and writing about the Blazers every day as if they’re the most important thing in the universe. If I can do that, you can too! Or at least you can overcome a few losses, or even a few years of losing.
Beyond that, as I thought about this question I thought about my own Blazers fandom. And you’re right! There are a lot of hard things about it! Which got me to thinking…
You tabbed losing games as the hardest thing about the process. As I considered, I came across the following things that I, personally, think are harder than losing games. They’re in no particular order:
- Watching favorite players pass beyond their careers, particularly if they’re shortened by injury. Somewhere in my mind, Brandon Roy and Scottie Pippen and Damian Lillard and Arvydas Sabonis and Clyde Drexler are playing all together. Obviously this includes losing players we love like Maurice Lucas, Bill Walton, Jerome Kersey, Kevin Duckworth, and Drazen Petrovic. Miss you guys.
- Feeling a sense of impermanence. The Los Angeles Lakers pretty much know that they’ll be there as long as there is an NBA. They also know they have a never-ending fountain of free agents pouring into their system. Even when the Blazers get one, it’s never secure. And who knows where the next one will come from? Changes of ownership, expansion talks…pretty much everything evokes a latent feeling of insecurity. Even success is followed by, “How do we pay for this?” It’s an impoverished way to view the world.
- Watching people try to use the Blazers and their achievements as a way to promote themselves or their opinions, as if our collective experience only existed to highlight them. As if they were the center of the universe and the team was a collection of bit players in their show.
- Watching people in power within the sport use that power to lie, preserve their positions, or manipulate public discourse, as if all of us were just bit players in their show.
- Hearing fans equate disappointing performances with poor character, or hearing fans otherwise disparage players as human beings rather than analyzing/critiquing their work.
- Knowing what it is to win and be successful—having experienced the community joy that comes from big-time success—but not being able to climb that mountain. Forgetting what the mountain even looks like to the point that small-scale, pretend substitutes have to suffice. Then hearing people sell those substitutes as if they were reality.
- Watching other teams get to run faster up the hill through luck or natural advantages that the Blazers simply don’t have (and can’t get): tax breaks and ping pong ball follies and all that. Organic achievement is one thing. Fate and imbalance are something else.
- Having to watch one more potentially-exciting fourth quarter marred by interminable instant replay delays. Or hearing fans boo when the ruling goes against their team even when the ruling is clearly right.
I think I could take any number of losses better than I take those things.
What about you, fellow readers? What things would you consider worse than losing in your life of sports fandom? Share them in the comments section below! And if you’d like to send in your own question, you can email it to blazersub@gmail.com. We’ll try to get to as many as we can!
