Checking in on the Portland Trail Blazers amidst a win streak

The Portland Trail Blazers are coming in hot with a three-game win streak after beating the Minnesota Timberwolves twice and another against the Atlanta Hawks. Their record now stands at 6 wins with 8 losses, moving them up in power rankings.

Mike Richman is the host of the "Locked on Blazers" podcast. He joins us to break down the wins, losses and the hope for the future of Rip City’s beloved team.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. For the first time in nearly two years, the Portland Trail Blazers have won three games in a row. It may not be time for a massive celebration, but it’s been a rare bright spot in a pretty dark few years. Mike Richman is the host of the daily “Locked On Blazers” podcast. He joins us now to talk about the good, the bad and the question marks, one month into the season. Mike, welcome back.

Mike Richman: Thanks for having me.

Miller: We waited until now to have our beginning of the season check-in. And it seems fortuitous, after I guess an unexpectedly mediocre start. Losing eight of their first 11 games, the Blazers have now won three in a row. What has this mini-run been like?

Richman: Hopeful, I think. This team isn’t expected to be good and even with the three wins in a row, they’re still near the bottom of the Western Conference standings. But I think, for the first time in the last year and some change, the post-Damian Lillard era for the Trail Blazers, you can see the vision of what’s on the other side of the hill. Before, it was so theoretical. And I think in these games with Donovan Clingan, their rookie big man playing well, and third year player Shaedon Sharpe having back-to-back 30-point games, you can say, “Oh these are the young guys that are going to be part of the next good version of this team,” as opposed to saying, “Yeah, we know who they are, but we haven’t seen it in action yet.”

Miller: Well, let’s talk about some of these folks, in particular. So, what can you tell us about how Shaedon Sharpe has been looking recently?

Richman: Well he’s scored 30 points in back-to-back games. He’s the youngest Trail Blazer to ever have consecutive 30-point games, which I think maybe speaks to people staying in college longer in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, more than anything else. But he had a career-high against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Wednesday and followed that up with just one shy of that total on Sunday, against the Atlanta Hawks.

The question for Sharpe was mostly about how consistently he could hit his peaks. He’s been really good in short bursts and again, three games is probably another short burst. But he has been assertive and willing to take the most shots on the team, in a way that he hadn’t always been. And I think that willingness to take the burden of being the guy who does it all is a big step forward for young players.

Miller: Could you say, would you say, that Shaedon Sharpe is the best player on the team right now or the player who’s playing the best, which are maybe different things?

Richman: They probably are different things. I would say he is the player who’s playing the best, with the caveat that probably offense is more valuable than defense.

Miller: You mentioned Donovan Clingan, the one of the rookies. What has he shown you so far?

Richman: He’s really, really big, Dave. He’s a very, very big person. He’s like 7’3”, 290 and he looks like it. In a land of giants, if you spend enough time around NBA players, Donovan Clingan is giant among them. Maybe this is too simple of a way to put it, but he understands that he’s big, and that is his best value. He knows that he can be gigantic and in the way. And he does a really good job of being gigantic and in the way.

He has a real feel about how to play defense, and how to defend the rim, and how to use his size in a way that probably belies his 20-year-old age. He has a real, real sense about him and he plays with it. And he had one game last week against the Timberwolves in which he put together maybe the best defensive stretch we’ve seen from a Blazers big man in a decade. He was phenomenal for a brief five minutes against the Timberwolves. And he helped the Blazers win a game as a 20-year-old center still figuring it out.

Miller: One of the mantras for this season on the part of the franchise seems to be, let’s see what we have. There were a lot of injuries last year. Let’s see, in particular, how good Scoot Henderson is. If you had to answer that question right now, what would you say? How good is Scoot Henderson?

Richman: Not very.

Miller: OK, the follow up … I should say, there are some numbers here, which will mean something for folks who follow basketball. He can be sloppy with the ball. He’s averaging over three turnovers a game. And he’s only averaging eleven points. Can you just remind the folks, who pay less attention to the Blazers, what the hopes were for what Scoot Henderson would be for this team, for a long time?

Richman: Scoot Henderson was drafted last season as the third overall pick. And typically, in the history of the league, the players drafted in the top five in the NBA are relied upon to be franchise pillars. And it is where the vast majority of league MVPs have come from – those top five picks. Those players are selected to be foundational pieces of the franchise. And part of drafting Scoot Henderson coincided with losing a foundational piece of the franchise in Damian Lillard. They play the same position.

There was some pressure on Scoot to really deliver. And during his rookie season, he struggled. He was supposed to be this special, different type of rookie because he didn’t go to college. He, in fact, left high school early and entered the G-League and played professional basketball for two years before entering the NBA. So he was supposed to be further along, more seasoned, not your typical 19-year-old point guard playing in the NBA. And he wasn’t. He struggled.

Miller: OK, but then there’s the “but,” which is that he’s still only 20 years old. He’s only played in 75 total NBA games. Just to put that in perspective, the regular season total is 82 games. So when you combine those things, I mean, how much patience do you think fans have at this point for “the Scoot experiment”? How much time are they willing to give him to bloom before they say that this idea was a bust?

Richman: Yeah, I think the beauty of fandom is that some people are willing to give him two more seasons to up to five more seasons. And some people were ready to quit on him in July.

Miller: But they’ll change their mind if he blooms two years from now.

Richman: 100%. That’s the other beauty of fandom is it’s very fickle. You can do whatever you want. No one’s gonna check you. Undoubtedly, if you’ve watched Scoot closely which I have had the luxury of doing, he’s better than he was. He has improved a great deal since his first games in the NBA to now. It’s just the bar has been lowered such that what improvement looks like is very different. We’re measuring him against what he is, not what the team and the franchise thought he would be.

So I think there’s reason to be patient with him. The way his contract works is the Blazers can pay him for the next two seasons without having to make any other financial decisions. They can just continue to pick up his contract options. I think they’ll do that. And they’ll have space to make those decisions once they see him finish out this year and play another 164 games beyond that.

Miller: If you’re looking at the Blazers right now through the most hopeful glasses, what are the other really bright spots?

Richman: They have found an identity. What they built this thing to be, is starting to take shape. Outside of Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe, to some extent, the Blazers have a bunch of guys who are 6’6” to 6’10”, who are physical, strong defenders, who are really good athletes, and they play with size. They’re one of the largest teams in the league. And for years, that was not true at all. They were one of the smaller teams in the league and that was their struggle.

So guys like Toumani Camara – who they found as part of the Damian Lillard trade – and a player they’ve traded for, Deni Avdija, and the emergence of Jerami Grant as more effective in the context of this year’s team, they have size and athleticism. And they’re a better defensive team than they’ve been in a long time. Along the way, when you’re trying to build a good team, if you happen to stumble into some really useful role players, it makes finding that star, if Shaedon Sharpe were to take that leap, a lot simpler because you already have some parts that are gonna be helpful on any version of a basketball team you’re building.

Miller: Mike, I want to turn now to a huge loss to the broader Blazers community. Brian Wheeler, who was the radio play-by-play broadcaster for the team from 1998 to 2019, died recently at the age of 62. He was really good at what has always struck me as one of the hardest jobs in sports broadcasting, which is painting a word picture that communicates to a radio audience what’s happening, in a really dynamic, relentlessly fast game. When you listened to “Wheels” call a game, you could basically see the action in your head and you could absolutely feel the excitement.

I want to play a short interview that I did with Wheels. It’s from the day we spent at the Moda Center in 2019. We went there to get a behind the scenes look at what happens before, and during, and after a Blazers game. I found Wheels in the basement, a few hours before tip off. And he was writing players' names and stats in truly tiny script on a scorecard, something that apparently he did in preparation for every single game.

I asked him how he got started in broadcasting.

Brian “Wheels” Wheeler [recording]: I was fairly astute growing up, in that I was 10 or 11 years old and I knew I loved sports. But I could see that as much as I could play any sport and be competitive, I wasn’t going to excel in any one sport enough to play it seriously as I got older. So I thought to myself, “What can I do to stay connected to sports if I can’t play?” And I think it was my mother who said, “Well, you like to talk a lot and maybe you can do something with that.” So I said, “Yeah, I’ll be a broadcaster.” And so I told all my friends, as we were playing touch football on the street, “I’m going to be a broadcaster.” They’d say, “Hey, announce the game while we’re playing.” And I was an only child and so I did.

Sometimes, I’d have a nerf ball in my bedroom and a nerf hoop, and when the ball was in my left hand, “Smith” had it. [When it] was my right hand, “Jones” had it. And I’d call these Maple Leaf games. And sometimes the door would be closed, my mother would be walking by and she’d say, “Stop talking to yourself.” I’d say, “I’m doing a game,” you know. And so I think I got a lot of practice and maybe through just the repetition of it, from starting at an early age, maybe that helped to be able to keep up with the pace of the game.

Miller [recording]: How did you develop the style of alliterations?

Wheels [recording]: Ah, that’s interesting. I guess I’d always liked words and so I always did well in English, and in class, and speech communication, and so forth. And so I think I just stumbled on it one day and then somebody said, “Oh, that’s kind of clever.” Then I couldn’t figure out what’s the appropriate time to do it. So I kind of decided, “Well, I’m kind of limiting it to the so-called ‘hot timeout,’ when the Blazers are doing something well enough that the other coach has to call a timeout.” And I got to come up with words that indicate frustration, or anger, or disappointments, or sadness, or confusion.

It’s interesting when you go through a thesaurus and kind of go through the letters, some of them, some of them don’t offer three words that kind of indicate that, but some letters offer more than three. So it kind of makes up for it. But it’s been something popular and I’ve had fans say, “You know, we like it because we don’t know if you’re going to do it. We don’t know when you’re going to do it, and we don’t know what letter you’re going to do and when you do it.” So it’s kind of added an extra element of maybe a surprise to each broadcast.

Miller [recording]: Are they written down somewhere here or are they just in your head?

Wheels [recording]: I have a sheet that I keep kind of a running score, and I have it in the left hand corner. So when the hot timeout comes, I’m not kind of searching for it. But I could tell you, I mean, if you asked me to, I could do ashamed, astonished, astounded. Bewildered, befuddled, bemused. Confused, concerned, confounded. Dejected, deflated, devastated. Harried, harassed, humbled. Jilted, jaded, jolted. Mystified, mesmerized, mortified. What’s S? Staggered, stunned, stupefied. Terrified, troubled, tormented. So I can do most of them from memory.

Miller [recording]: Do you have a favorite?

Wheels [recording]: I like the staggered, stunned, stupefied or the mystified, mesmerized, mortified. I think those are. If I can get three words, and the first two or three letters are all the same, then that’s a good challenge and I go for that whenever possible. So staggered, stunted, stupefied. I got the ST and then all those, so it ends up being kind of a good thing. But it’s a challenge sometimes to come up with the words, and every now and then some fans will, you know, throw in, “Hey, why don’t you try this word,” and I, “Oh, I didn’t think of that one.” So I’m always open to new suggestions.

Miller [recording]: What is it about radio?

Wheels [recording]: I remember, I was in Sacramento before I got to Portland. I was a backup play- by- play announcer. The main guy would miss 10-15 games a season. And one of the games I did that first year was the second game of a playoff series between the Kings and the Sonics in Seattle, and the Kings won the game. It was their first playoff victory at that time. And I remember I was walking down after the game to meet some friends at a restaurant, and as I was walking, I said, “You know, I can’t duplicate this kind of excitement,” of being able to call a game that’s one of the historic games in this team’s franchise to this point in time. I can’t get that excitement doing anything else. So for me, radio, and play-by-play, and the challenge of trying to paint a picture ...

The best, the best compliment I’ve ever had is my first season here. Jim Jackson, one of our players, was good friends with Stevie Wonder. And Stevie Wonder was in the first row at courtside as we were doing the game. And I kept wondering the whole game, “How is he enjoying the game?” I saw him smile every now and then. But he smiles a lot anyway, so I didn’t know if he really if it was just the atmosphere he was soaking in. But then when the game was over, one of his friends in the group came up to me and said, “Stevie would like to meet you. He had an earpiece in, and was listening to the whole game, and he really thought you did a great job.” So it was before the days of a camera on a phone. I don’t have any visual evidence of it, but it did happen. I did get a chance to meet him and talk to him. And I thought to myself that night that if I can hopefully have a blind person somehow have a concept of what’s going on, I guess I’m doing a pretty good job of painting a picture.

Miller: That was the late Brian Wheeler, the legendary Blazers radio play-by-play announcer in an interview we did in 2019.

Mike, when did you first start listening to Wheels?

Richman: I moved to Portland in the fall of 2006, which is the same fall of Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge, kind of the rise of a fun era of the Blazers. But I didn’t really start listening to Wheels regularly until about 2010 when I was a high school sports reporter and I spent a lot of time driving around at night to various suburban high school locations. And Wheels became my voice of the Blazers.

I missed Bill Schonely and because of my professional role now, I haven’t really listened to a ton of Travis Demers, who succeeded Wheels. So, Wheels is the guy who introduced me to Blazers fandom in a serious way. Because I don’t know that anyone around the team during the 15 years or so that I’ve done this has understood what it means to be a Blazer fan and demonstrate it, the way Wheels has.

Miller: How did he demonstrate that for you? What did he mean to you, as a fan?

Richman: He was just so stinking passionate, you know? You mentioned the alliteration. They’d go into a timeout and he’d say, “They’re flummoxed and flustered.” And another F word that he’d be better at than I am. But when things were going well, you felt it in Wheels' voice. And when things were going poorly, you felt it in Wheels' voice.

Later on in my professional career, I sat on press row, in Section 113, directly in front of the radio booth. And when things would go wrong, Brian would smack the table – a thunderous fist into the table, angry that things were going wrong. And at that point, I would physically feel it. There were times when he was calling games by himself on the radio, a solo three-and-a-half hour performance as a maestro. And his ability to channel emotions is second to none.

Miller: I mean, we could even hear it just in that very low key interview. We were just in the basement before the game. Nobody else was around there. I’d forgotten, until I listened back to this, just how fast he was even just socially talking. And it was a helpful, maybe necessary, component of being able to describe what’s happening when 10 people are running on a hardcourt very quickly.

I just want to change gears briefly, before we say goodbye. Because talking to some Blazers fans in the office yesterday, I’ve heard that one of the things that’s been fun this year is there’s a good crop of nicknames for the current players. What are some of your favorites this year?

Richman: Well, Donovan Clingan goes by Kling Kong, which I really like. It came with him from college and he’s, like I said, a giant person. But the best nickname on the team is DB Hooper. That is a nickname given to Delano Banton, the Blazer’s fifth year guard. It was bestowed by a Blazer fan, but it has become part of the lexicon. And I don’t think that there’s a better nickname in a long time, in Blazer world, that’s better than DB Hooper.

Miller: Mike, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it. It’s always fun talking with you.

Richman: Thanks for having me.

Miller: Mike Richman is the host of the daily podcast, “Locked on Blazers.”

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.