For the first time since the 2011-12 NBA season, the Portland Trail Blazers are going into the year without the services of Damian Lillard. We’ll make this quick as you know the story here, but Lillard is now a member of the Milwaukee Bucks on the heels of a tense offseason where he requested a trade to the Miami Heat.
Now, Portland has to prepare for life without arguably the greatest player in franchise history, which is a difficult spot for a lot of teams, because it requires a full-scale rebuild after years of going all-in on getting the best out of that specific player. But while the Blazers probably won’t win a ton of games — someone in the Western Conference has to have a bad record — there’s talent on this team and there’s plenty of draft capital that can help them as they put together their roster going forward. Even if a postseason berth of any kind this year is a bit optimistic, this year has the potential to be a fun one in the Pacific Northwest.
Biggest Question: How Does Scoot Henderson’s Rookie Year Go?
We’ll never know everything that went on this offseason, but one thing we do know is that Lillard wanted Portland to turn the No. 3 pick in the 2023 NBA Draft into immediate help. The team decided to not do that, and instead used the pick on Scoot Henderson, the dynamic guard from the G League Ignite who has been pegged as a potential All-Star for years.
Putting major expectations on Henderson right away is not fair. He is, at the end of the day, a teenager who is about to make the jump to the most difficult professional basketball league in the world. But for everything that Portland got (and will continue to get) in the Lillard trade — whether that be the one that sent Lillard our or the subsequent ones involving players they acquired for him — the most important piece of the puzzle is his successor, who will now get the opportunity to spread his wings and fly from the jump.
There’s a solid core around Henderson, and those players should help take some of the pressure off of him as he finds his way in the league. That might take a while, because being a rookie point guard is just not easy. But between his natural ability and the way he’s wired, it makes sense to want to bet on Henderson in the long-term — remember, while the No. 1 pick in the 2023 NBA Draft was never in doubt, there was a school of thought that Henderson would have gone first overall in plenty of prior Drafts, as he’s the sort of guard prospect worth building your team around. This year is a chance for him to lay down a floor, and even though there are going to be obvious growing pains, the flashes he’ll probably show are what the Blazers are banking on.
X-Factor: Shaedon Sharpe Taking Another Step
Sharpe’s unusual path to the NBA has been well-documented. There’s a chance he could have been in the conversation to go No. 1 overall in the 2022 NBA Draft if he played in college, but instead, he went through his only season at Kentucky without playing a single game. And while he was not perfect during his first year in the league by any stretch of the imagination, Sharpe’s flashes as a potential game-changing talent on the wing with rare athleticism were quite promising.
It’s worth noting that the Blazers’ priorities … we’ll say evolved as the year went on — they played 24 games after the All-Star break, won five of them, and Lillard was shut down for the final 10 games of the year. Sharpe’s play was a bright spot over this stretch, as he shouldered a bigger load down the stretch and responded well. Those final 10 games without Lillard were especially promising for Sharpe, as he played in nine of them and averaged 23.7 points, 5.8 rebounds, and 4.2 assists in 35.5 minutes a night while shooting 45.8 percent from the field and 36 percent from three.
He’s similar to Henderson in that the infrastructure around him is going to be important, because even though he has a year of NBA experience under his belt, the amount of responsibility that is going to be on his shoulders is increasing. The reps he gets this year are going to be gigantic for the long-term outlook of the Blazers. If he makes the most of them, Portland’s post-Lillard rebuild is going to look even more exciting.
