Portland Trail Blazers small forward Deni Avdija has had a heck of a season on his current team, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t tough being traded from his old one.
Josh Robbins of The Athletic (subscription required) spoke with Avdija and those close to him about the trade that brought him from the Washington Wizards to Portland:
The trade from Washington is not something the usually affable Avdija enjoys talking about. Before the 2023-24 regular season, he and the Wizards reached a rookie-scale contract extension, which kicked in this season, worth $55 million over four years. At the time he inked that extension, and for months afterward, Avdija considered his new deal as a vote of confidence in him, and rightly so. The draft-night trade stunned him — and hurt him. In an Instagram story that he posted shortly after the trade, he wrote: “Dc u will forever be in my heart” and included a broken-heart emoji.
When asked about the trade on Sunday, after the Blazers’ win over the Toronto Raptors, he said, “It was nighttime at my place (in Israel), and I woke up. I saw I got traded, and it was very hard for me. All the friendships that I had with the guys there, the city, the fans — it all just disappeared in a second. But everything’s for the good. I feel like I found a nice home in Portland.”
Avdija – averaging career-highs in points per game (15.3) and usage rate (22.2%) and one-tenth of a percentage point off his career high in true shooting percentage (59.6%) – has found his groove for a Portland team that has needed his young veteran leadership and his ability to make something out of nothing off the break.
It took him a little while to adjust to a new team, but he found his groove… “We’ve let him have a lot more responsibility with the ball, and he keeps proving to get better and better at it,” Blazers coach Chauncey Billups said. “He’s like a one-man fast break when he gets the ball. Some of these things, I didn’t even know about when we got him, because we only played him twice a year, so I didn’t know that much. But he’s been a pleasant surprise. The fire that he plays with, I think, takes our team to another level. The edge that he plays with, the toughness that he plays with — we need it.”
The Blazers’ best player for stretches of this season, Avdija has three more guaranteed years on a descending $55M contract he signed in Washington that will see him paid $14.3M next year, $13.1M the year after, and $11.8M for the 2027-28 season.