By all accounts, including their own, the Portland Trail Blazers exceeded expectations during their 2024-25 campaign. You’d think that the performance, adding half again to their preseason win total expectations, would engender a tidal wave of praise from their fan base. For the most part, this hasn’t happened. Fans are nervous, jumpy, and in some corners frustrated despite their team’s growth. Why? That’s the subject of today’s Blazer’s Edge Mailbag.
Dave,
I don’t understand how the team getting better with Deni and five young players isn’t getting more credit from my fellow fans. I want to blame it on not enough wins but we’ve been through harder seasons before with more hope and praise. Do you think not winning enough is the only cause or is something deeper causing fans to turn against the team and management?
Ryan
Winning cures everything, they say. Basically accurate. If the Blazers were winning 55 games the angst in Portland would be much less. So in a way, the losses are the main contributing factor. When the Blazers win, their managers and coaches will be seen as competent. If they don’t, they won’t. There’s no way around that basic math.
A few other factors come into the equation right now, though. The team is facing a PR… well… I don’t want to call it a crisis, per se. It’s not. The Jail Blazers Era was a crisis. This is more of a void. The franchise is doing the right things, but the multiplicative factor that used to amplify their actions has been muted. They’re getting a fraction of the response that they once would have for doing the same things.
Back in the Championship Era, the Blazers were the talk of the town. I forget the exact number, but something like 80% of the region watched the NBA Finals broadcast on CBS when the Blazers won it all. The team was a uniting force. Everybody knew them. Everybody talked about them. Under those conditions, Dave Twardzik could sneeze sideways and all of Portland would not only acknowledge it, but applaud. With the franchise reaching the playoffs for two straight decades, their marriage with fans was happy and prosperous.
The Jail Blazers era brought the great divorce. It overloaded the ecosystem. Fans had been attending the team fervently, listening with hearing aids, picking up the franchise’s smallest breaths and subtlest syllables. Those early-2000’s teams were like somebody blaring profanity through a loudspeaker down those same surveillance lines. Everybody jumped back, threw down their earpieces in disgust, and left.
The Brandon Roy/LaMarcus Aldridge/Greg Oden era introduced a new relationship, a reconciliation of sorts. Had that lineup been able to flower, the marriage may have rekindled full force. Injuries took away that dream, leaving a second void in their wake.
Into that gap stepped two figures who would define the next decade for the Blazers and their fans: General Manager Neil Olshey and his pinnacle draft pick, Damian Lillard. Olshey was ready to create a superstar in Portland. Lillard was ready to ascend. It was the perfect match. Lillard’s charisma bridged the distance between the franchise and its fans. All was well! Or at least well enough for the moment.
Two movements typified the Lillard Era, though. Their effects remain today.
The first was Olshey’s insistence that the Blazers were on the right course and that staying steady was the right move. From the outside, it seemed like to Olshey, the job was already done when Lillard came on board. The franchise had its face. They were winning enough to be semi-credible. If the team looked good, what else was needed? (Hint: Actual progress and winning, which largely never happened.)
Shuffling different veterans around Lillard and backcourt mate CJ McCollum like so many coconut shells in a “track the ping pong ball” street game became the order of the day. Every season brought new, somehow magically-right moves that were better than the last. Every summer became an exercise in excuse-making, explaining why those moves didn’t produce better results. As the cognitive dissonance became palpable, fans learned to take the franchise’s explanations with a grain of salt, especially if those explanations involved, “Be patient, trust us, and don’t expect any big moves.”
The second movement was the complete embodiment of the franchise, name, culture, and reputation in Lillard. Damian became the cure-all for whatever ailed Portland. Disappointed with the amount of wins? Look at Lillard’s All-Star berth or scoring numbers. Want an explanation of what’s going wrong or what the next plan is? Gee, isn’t Dame charismatic? Who could not like a guy like him? Did you see his latest commercial?
Lillard became Portland’s One Ring. The Blazers invested the lion’s share of their power and identity in him, the better to take control of the hearts of the fan base. When the Ring got thrown into Mt. Doom (aka Milwaukee), all of that went with it. The same void that existed before Lillard and Olshey returned, augmented by yet another failed plan, a decade of frustration from not being able to advance back to the NBA heights. Except this time, instead of a bright new superstar on the horizon to rescue them, the Blazers had a roll of the dice in Scoot Henderson, a bunch of untried players, and several seasons’ worth of cap-clogging contracts to clear.
Under those circumstances—needing multiple years to restock the larder, grow young talent, and develop maneuverability—what was the front office to say? “Be patient. Trust us. And don’t expect any big moves, at least not immediately, because moving Dame was the only one possible for now.”
Guess what? That sounds just like the Olshey Era PR line. Except this time instead of throwing the microphone to the charismatic cure-all, they traded him away.
I don’t think Blazers fans are frustrated with losing as such. Anyone who looked at the shape of this team as the decade turned five years ago pretty much knew that they’d either have to climb the mountain quickly or plunge into a hard rebuild. The climb didn’t happen. Trudging through the valley is no surprise.
But I do think that Blazers fans have now experienced over two decades trying to light their way through the void, longer than their famous playoffs run through the 1980’s and 1990’s. They’ve also heard all the explanations, including and especially, “We’re staying the course.” Logically, there’s nothing else Joe Cronin and the front office can say right now, especially since his own contract extension is part of the affirmation. But when Blazers fans see Head Coach Chauncey Billups getting an extension with a 35% winning rate, when they contemplate Anfernee Simons and Deandre Ayton getting extended as well, when they look at potential cap space dwindling and draft picks sinking in the lottery order, they’re not just evaluating current events, but the times they’ve seen this exact thing before only to end up right back in that void.
If this really is the right road forward, the Blazers have to compensate for it. It won’t be enough to explain their moves in PR-savvy basketball terms. Nor will another advertising slogan make their issues disappear. They have to work towards actually winning with one hand. With the other they need to reestablish connections with the fan base that go beyond winning, that close the gap between fans and franchise, so that at least if we’re walking in a void, we’re walking in it together.
Part of that probably involves truth-telling about the void. Honesty and vulnerability about who they are, their aims and biases, and how they see the relationship between the team and its fans would probably also help. For better or worse, fans felt like they knew Paul Allen, Nate McMillan and Terry Stotts, Clyde Drexler and Damian Lillard. Who do you feel like you really know and can relate to on the current team? Everyone from Jody Allen to Anfernee Simons is pretty much an enigma. That doesn’t help. Until fans feel like they can relate to their heroes, it doesn’t matter what those heroes say or do. Short of winning the ultimate prize—and the Blazers are far away from that right now—nobody will care.
I think the franchise can use the same balkanization of access that prevents 80% of fans from ever gathering in one place to their advantage, though. They’re never going to reach enough people, nor reach them personally enough, with a press conference. Those have their place—namely to explain basketball moves in basketball terms—but they’re only half of the story. They’re like the GPS map through the void. How about the companionship, camaraderie, approachability, and comfort as we walk the steps of that journey? That used to be a hallmark of the relationship between the team and its fans. It’s all but disappeared now.
At the same time, everybody around the Blazers is communicating more organically, personally, and in tighter-knit small communities than ever before. If the Blazers can crack the code on that, making their fans feel more informed and included, less abandoned, they do have a chance to start a new era of good feeling somewhat independent of their win-loss record. They, and we, just have to interpret the lingering suspicion between the parties less as, “Why aren’t you winning?” and more as, “Where did you go?”
When the Blazers have figured that out—investing the identity of the franchise as much in their walk with the fan base as in a given player, executive, or move—they’ll begin to bridge the gap with more skill and finesse. And when that happens, I bet you’ll see more charitable interpretations of their actions from the fan side as well.
Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as we can!