With the Portland Trail Blazers in a wee bit of a slump, fans have been getting louder about the shortcomings of the franchise’s approach to winning in the NBA. Increasingly the brunt of the griping is shifting to the lap of Blazers Owner Jody Allen, with the usual blame laid on General Manager Joe Cronin and the front office besides.
This Blazer’s Edge Mailbag question is one of the more polite and publishable examples of the phenomenon.
Dave,
We all know the Blazers aren’t well. I and others think it’s time for Jody to sell and get some fresh perspective in the hizzouse. Part of me thinks though that even a new owner isn’t the complete solution. That’s the question. Is Jody that bad of an owner? How much potential improvement is there with a change?
Allen
It’s nearly impossible to say. The gradient of owners isn’t as clear as it seems. Or, better put, the brightest line on the whole graph lies at the border between “Best of the Best” and “All the Rest”. South of that line, effects get harder to discern.
If NBA Championships were distributed randomly, on a strict percentage-odds basis, each franchise would be expected to win a title an average of once every 30 years. That’s an incredibly long span. Chances are we’d spend at least 20 out of the 29 non-title years griping about our team’s lack of random dice-rolling strategy. Heaven forbid we should get an unlucky number that takes 40 or 50 years to roll. Torches and pitchforks would materialize. The response is less chess strategist than old man yelling at cloud.
Randomness has little to do with actual NBA titles, of course, give or take Draft Lottery luck. (Looking side-eye at you, San Antonio.) In real life, teams with the best players tend to win the biggest trophies regardless of opposition.
Take a look at the list of NBA Champions from the 2020’s. The Los Angeles Lakers won it all in 2020, when LeBron James was still considered the best player, or at least one of the best players, in the league. Giannis Antetokounmpo led the Milwaukee Bucks to the 2021 title during his peak MVP era. Steph Curry was past his MVP prime in 2022, but he was still regarded as the best point guard in existence. Nikola Jokic was hailed as the greatest player in the sport when he took the Denver Nuggets to the promised land in 2023. This year’s Boston Celtics were an anomaly. Neither Jayson Tatum nor Jaylen Brown were considered as top MVP candidates. They did it as a team. But Luka Doncic, who led the Dallas Mavericks to the Finals to battle Boston, certainly qualified as a peak player.
Here are the two most pressing questions facing the Blazers right now:
- Do you have one of the very best players in the whole NBA?
- Can you get one of the very best players in the whole NBA?
If the answer to both is “no”, then they’re not going to be in the tippy-top echelon no matter what they do. That includes changing owners.
The obvious caveat here is that teams can build infrastructure, create culture, and draft well. Those things move the franchise forward, increasing the odds of getting a superlative player, providing support around him. Ownership has a hand in all that. But until that breakthrough happens, we don’t really know how effective the process is. It’s just plans and promises from another team in the large group that’s not there yet.
I believe there is room for improvement in Portland’s offices, from the top on down. I don’t think Jody Allen has done that bad of a job. She did what anyone would have done, taking over an organization foreign to her in the midst of an apparently positive upward trend in 2018. She trusted and retained the people who appeared to create that momentum. It turned out neither the trend nor the expertise were reliable. It took a few years to figure that out. Now they’re in the process of cleaning up. I’m not sure any of us could have done anything different, or better, under those circ*mstances, unless we were some kind of genius savant.
Unfortunately, some NBA offices—and ownership suites—are full of genius savants, and/or people with experience, and/or people who are willing to do (and spend) anything to get a trophy. Lacking that, it’s hard to recreate it or substitute for it, even with the best of intentions under the best of circ*mstances. That’s how you end up in “the rest” category.
Maybe Portland’s next owner will qualify, or at least learn how to get there. Maybe they’ll get some side-eye San Antonio luck in the lottery. If not, changing ownership is going to be a hot story, perhaps bringing some improvements, but the road ahead will still be long and the results muddled.
Thanks for the question! You all can send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as possible!
