After a heady summer, a new season full of uncertainty is at the Trail Blazers’ doorstep

A new head coach. The return of a star player. An uncertain future for the team’s arena.

That’s just a taste of what’s on tap for the Portland Trail Blazers as they head into the 2026-27 NBA season, beginning with a game against the Phoenix Suns at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Moda Center.

The season opener comes on the heels of a playoff appearance last spring that shook Rip City fans out of a five-year slump. This is also the first game in what’s likely to be a whirlwind season — both on and off the court — as the team navigates changes across the organization, from top leadership to the player roster.

Speaking at a media event Sunday, the Blazers’ new head coach Micah Nori said he feels “great” coming out of the NBA preseason. That’s after a summer of training and getting to know the team, which includes the newly acquired Ja Morant and previously injured Damian Lillard.

“You know, when you come into this, you want to try to establish your habits, your culture, your standards, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job of doing that,” Nori said.

Nori’s first season with the Blazers comes about a year after former head coach Chauncy Billups was arrested by the FBI and charged with wire fraud and money laundering. Tiago Splitter took over as interim head coach before Nori was hired.

Mike Richman, host of the “Locked on Blazers” podcast, said one of Nori’s challenges this season will be maximizing the strengths of his players. For one, the Blazers will finally have point guard Damain Lillard back on the court after he spent 16 months recovering from a torn achilles tendon.

“I think just the excitement of having franchise-legend Damian Lillard return is really cool,” Richman said. But Nori will have to find a balance between Lillard and the team’s new point guard Ja Morant, Richman added.

“They seem to have some overlap both in their role and also their deficiencies,” Richman said. “If they’re gonna win games, they’re probably gonna win by scoring. And I don’t know — that’s typically that’s pretty fun. Everybody loves buckets.”

The Blazers are bringing perhaps their most intriguing line-up to the court in half a decade, Richman said. “Deni Avdija is really good. Damian Lillard’s back. You know, the Ja Morant thing is an interesting experiment with a very talented player,” Richman said.

Meanwhile, off-the-court shakeups have continued to draw attention away from the sport itself.

Ongoing negotiations between the Blazers and state and local political leaders over renovations to the Moda Center have stoked fears that unless the parties reach an agreement, the Blazers’ controversial new owner, Tom Dundon, could move the team out of Portland.

Portland City Council will make a final vote on its agreement to renovate the arena, which the city owns, in early December. That’s when negotiations with the Blazers are due to wrap up.

In August, the city approved its terms for the agreement, which serve as a blueprint for a long-term lease of the arena. The Moda Center renovations are currently backed by roughly $600 million in public funds, with about $120 million coming from the city.

But the team has indicated it opposes some of the city’s proposed terms, including allowing arena workers to unionize and being required to make annual payments in lieu of property taxes.

“My read on the entire situation, as they have presented themselves publicly, is that they want to maximize their profits, and they have some leverage to do so,” Richman said. “The leverage is the threat of relocation.”

At a media day event last month, Blazers President of Business Operations Dewayne Hankins said the organization is doing everything it can “to ensure that the Trail Blazers stay right here.”

Another recent Blazers controversy was the firing of Braiden Bell. Earlier this month, the Trail Blazers announced Bell as their new play-by-play TV announcer — only to fire him hours later after a KGW reporter found racist and misogynistic posts on Bell’s Twitter account from 2012 and 2013, when he was 15.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Ja Morant’s name. OPB regrets the error.