The Portland Trail Blazers have now won 10 of their last 11 games, including Monday’s thrilling overtime victory against the Phoenix Suns. Their streak has now extended to six games with last night’s win against the Sacramento Kings. It’s a dramatic turnaround to a season that began with a slew of losses, and while the Blazers still have more losses than wins, expectations are rising about how they’ll end the season in late April.
Sean Highkin is the founder of the Substack newsletter, The Rose Garden Report. He joins us to talk about what’s behind the dramatic turnaround, from the team’s captivating chemistry to adjustments Coach Chauncey Billups has made that have sparked dominant performances on the court.
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 on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Portland Trail Blazers are on a roll. After losing 28 of their first 41 games to start the season, they’ve now won six in a row, and 10 out of their last 11. They’re playing with good intensity, good defense, good vibes, but how significant is this stretch of games? What does it mean for the future, especially after the trading deadline has come and gone, without any big moves from the Blazers front office?
Sean Highkin pays attention to the team’s day-to-day grind and to their big picture. He writes The Rose Garden Report Substack and he joins us now. Welcome back.
Sean Highkin: Hey, thanks for having me.
Miller: Can you put this recent hot streak in context? What does it mean for the team?
Highkin: Well, based on what you just said earlier, the Blazers, going into their game against the Chicago Bulls on January 19 – which is when this run started – were 13-28. So about in line, I guess, with kind of where they were last season, where they ended the season 21-61. They had the fourth worst record in the NBA, which was kind of where people expected them to be for a couple of years after they traded Damian Lillard in the summer of 2023 and started a rebuild. So for them to have this run … and now they’re closer to the play-in tournament than they are to the top of the lottery, which I don’t think anybody expected.
I think the last time the, I guess for lack of a better term, vibes were this good were at the very beginning of the ‘22-’23 season, which was Damian Lillard’s last year in Portland. They started the year, I think, 4-0. That year ended up kind of going off the rails because of injuries and other stuff. But for the first couple of weeks of the season, they were the hottest team in the Western Conference. People were kind of talking about them as a fringe title contender. And of course that was with Dame. Obviously, these guys are not talked about in that way even after this run.
After the way last season went and the way the start of this season went, I think a lot of fans were just kind of trying to get through this season until the draft lottery. Then hope that they had good luck in the lottery, got one of the top two or three picks and ended up with Cooper Flagg, or Dylan Harper, or one of the other guys at the top of the lottery. But then they just, kind of out of nowhere, started winning and now maybe the way that the team is talked about is a little bit different.
Miller: How many games have you needed to see – or maybe it’s still a future-oriented question – do you need to see in the coming days or weeks before you say that you’re looking at something real, as opposed to some combination of good luck, or the pieces falling in the right way, or just hitting pretty good teams at the right time? I mean, I’m just curious for you, if you’ve seen enough to make you think that you’re looking at a different team, a team on a different trajectory?
Highkin: I think this ship has kind of sailed on the trajectory of the season, because even if they lose every single game the rest of the season, I don’t think they’re going be able to get back into the top four of the lottery, which is kind of where they planned on being at the beginning of the season.
Miller: To get the best chance of some new young players.
Highkin: Yes, exactly. You saw after the trade deadline yesterday, Joe Cronin, the general manager, did a press conference like he does after every trade deadline. He was asked about whether they want to be in the Play-In. He didn’t say yes, our goal now is to be in the Play-In. But he did say that he thinks it would be unfair, with them on this run, to manipulate the way that players that are available or whatever, to try to go back to losing games and kind of just stall this momentum that they’re on. And he basically told the team, feel free to keep winning even though it’s going to hurt our lottery odds.
I think, at this point, the way they’re looking at it is, yes, in an ideal world they would like to have the best possible odds at landing somebody like Cooper Flagg in the draft lottery. But they’re also feeling like getting a taste of actually winning and winning for an extended period of time is good for their young players. Because when you’re one of these teams that’s rebuilding … it’s like a multi-year process, where you’re going to have a lot of years where there is a lot of losing. And I’ve seen this happen at other points, covering the league as long as I have in other places – when teams lose this much and losing is expected, players kind of develop losing habits and they start kind of being, not OK with losing, but just kind of accepting it and expecting it. So long-term, the idea of, OK, these guys now see some results if they keep playing the right way, keep playing together and keep doing what they’re supposed to be doing, this is what can happen. I think they feel like that’s as valuable as a couple of extra percentage points of getting the number one pick in the draft.
Miller: A lot of the energy and excitement that the team is generating right now, or feeding off of, comes from two players who do not come from countries known as major basketball powerhouses – Toumani Camara from Belgium; and Deni Avdija from Israel. What have they brought to the team in the last couple weeks?
Highkin: Well, Camara was one of the ancillary pieces that came over from Phoenix in the multi-team deal that ended up sending Damian Lillard to Milwaukee, before the start of last season. He was the 52nd pick in the 2023 NBA draft. He was not really a known prospect at all. But just what he does defensively and how he can guard every position on the floor, he’s kind of become the emotional heartbeat of the team. He’s become a lot better as an offensive player, I think, than a lot of people expected. His 3-point shot in recent weeks has gotten a lot more consistent. He’s one of these guys that, last night against the Kings, shot two of 13 from the field, but he still impacted the game, had 14 rebounds and did other things to help them win, even when he wasn’t shooting it well.
Then Deni Avdija, who they acquired on draft night this past year in a trade from Washington, he’s more of a the size of a small power forward, but he kind of has become a secondary playmaker. He’s building on the improved shooting that he had his last year in Washington. He’s also just brought an edge to what they do defensively, and kind of an attitude and a toughness that was maybe missing in the group that they had last season. So those are both huge additions.
Miller: What about the two of the players who had been seen as the foundation of the franchise for years to come – Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe?
Highkin: Well, I would say Scoot Henderson’s turnaround in the last five or six weeks … I would say his turnaround probably started at the start of the calendar year in 2025. Things were looking pretty rough for him. I don’t think he was ready to be fully written off yet, but it was becoming pretty clear that maybe this wasn’t going to be a franchise guy or that he wasn’t going to be the level of prospect that maybe they thought he would be, when they took him with the third overall pick in 2023. But over the last four, five, six weeks – whenever you want to say it started – at both ends of the floor, his defense has gotten a lot better and his shooting has gotten more consistency. His playmaking has improved. He started making a lot less mistakes and he’s really just starting to grow. I don’t know if he’s ever going to be a superstar, but I definitely think he … at this point, you can project that he can be a quality starter in the NBA.
Miller: But still not a starter, right, for the Blazers, technically?
Highkin: Well, that’s technically just because of some roster crunch stuff. I would think at some point they’re going to do something with Anfernee Simons. That was obviously one of the things that a lot of people talked about at the trade deadline. It didn’t end up happening, but I think at some point that’s probably a decision that’s going to have to be made.
Schaedon Sharpe, the other guy that you just brought up, he’s probably seen as the guy with the highest ceiling and the most talent, just raw talent on the entire roster. It’s been a little bit of an up and down thing for him too. Chauncey Billups at the beginning of this run that they’re on actually moved him to the bench, to send a message that his defense was not up to the standards. And to Sharpe’s credit, he’s responded. He’s been playing well at both ends of the floor, coming off the bench. He had 24 points off the bench last night in the win over Sacramento and he’s really settled nicely into that role. Those two guys at this point are, I think you can say, still very much a part of the future.
Miller: You mentioned Chauncey Billups, head coach who’s had a rocky time with the Blazers in the very beginning of his tenure, and he’s been hearing it from fans. What has it been like, before the last couple of games, when his name was announced at the start of the game?
Highkin: It’s bizarre to hear a coach getting booed at home, and you can understand in some regards why that would happen. I don’t want to go into this whole thing again, but the way that he was hired by Neil Olshey, the former president of basketball operations – that’s, I think, a thing that still doesn’t sit well with a lot of fans. And then the Blazers also just haven’t been doing a lot of winning. And then the other part of it with Billups is he’s in the final guaranteed year of his contract. And up until the last couple of weeks, it’s pretty much been a foregone conclusion that he’s not going to be back after this season.
Miller: The Blazers wouldn’t pick it up.
Highkin: Correct, yeah. I would have thought it was gonna be kind of a mutual thing. Like I think he would probably also be OK with moving on. That’s been my working assumption, really since last April. I’ve written probably six dozen times in that time and I haven’t gotten any pushback from anybody in the organization for writing it. So that’s kind of been the way that pretty much everybody’s been treating it.
I’m going to be very interested to see what happens now at the end of the season, because not only have they just been winning, but it does seem like the guys are responding to Chauncey. It seems like whatever buttons he’s pushing, whether it be moving Shaedon Sharpe to the bench and then him responding to that by playing really well, instead of just saying, “oh I’m mad that I’m not starting anymore. I’m just gonna check out” … I think a lot of [what] Chauncey does, I think deserve a lot of credit. I don’t know how it’s gonna go at the end of the season. But now I feel like the Blazers are gonna have a real decision to make about that, whereas we kind of thought up until two weeks ago that that decision had already been made.
Miller: Am I right that the players seem to like Chauncey Billups?
Highkin: Absolutely. It seems like they really respond to him, and they really have never not responded to him. Chauncey is a guy because of what his playing career was … and he was just inducted into the Hall of Fame this past October. But if you look at the way that his playing career went, he was a number three overall pick in 1997. But it took him a while for his own career to get going. It wasn’t really until he got to Detroit that he became an all-star, he became a finals MVP, all the stuff that he’s known for now. So he can kind of meet guys on different levels, in terms of, a guy like Scoot Henderson is struggling, and Chauncey can look at him and say, “Look, I also was a high draft pick at a point guard and I struggled early in my career,” and can kind of guide guys through that. He has that just kind of ability to relate to guys in a lot of different levels that I think has really paid off over this run.
Miller: I just want to turn briefly now to the big picture into the future. The word I’ve heard a little bit is “purgatory.” As you were saying earlier, they’re not playing so badly that they’ve got a good chance to get a top draft pick, but they’re also not playing so well that that they’re even in the middle of the teams in the NBA right now – they’re sort of stuck, it seems, being pretty good, being better than terrible. Where does that leave the team?
Highkin: It really depends on what they do this summer. I think there would be a real danger if they were to look at this from a very short-sighted standpoint of saying, these 10 games that they’ve been hot this last month, this is who we really are. Let’s just go all in on this group. Let’s pay guys a lot of money. Let’s not make any moves. Let’s just say this is our group. If they did that, I think that would be a mistake, and I think they know that. I don’t think that’s going to be the way that they go. But if they were to just completely double-down on this group based on being hot for two weeks, I think that would be when they would be in danger of being in a long term purgatory, like you just brought up.
I think, though, that they’re going this offseason to reassess. And Joe Cronin said something yesterday at his press conference. I asked him whether the last two weeks had impacted at all his decision to not do anything at the trade deadline and just kind of keep this team intact. He said that it didn’t. He said that their approach was what their approach was and that he was focused more on the big picture. So depending on what he’s able to do this summer, I think he’s still focused on having something that’s sustainable and isn’t just kind of capped at maybe being a Play-In team.
Miller: Sean, thanks very much.
Highkin: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Sean Highkin is founder of the Substack newsletter, The Rose Garden Report.
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.
