Lessons of the Portland Trail Blazers: Find your core and believe in them

The Portland Trail Blazers resisted calls to break up their team and made the Western Conference Finals. There are plenty of lessons to learn in them.

CJ McCollum was defiant when he went on Kevin Durant‘s podcast this past offseason. He claimed the Portland Trail Blazers should be considered one of the elite teams in the Western Conference and could challenge the Golden State Warriors’ claim for supremacy.

Durant laughed it off and seemed to scold McCollum for his bravado and belief. That sparked Internet reactions laughing at McCollum and the Blazers. Portland, after all, embarrassingly were swept out of the first round even with homecourt advantage.

Famously, McCollum responded to one fan shouting at him to win something with, “I’m trying Jennifer.”

The whole offseason and even regular season were spent debating whether they had gone as far as they could go with Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum as their top two players. The Orlando Magic got drawn into these ponderings as fans and national outlets pondered if swapping CJ McCollum for Aaron Gordon might not help both teams.

That was always a ludicrous idea. Honestly, for both teams. The analysis often mischaracterized Aaron Gordon’s game and was couched as “get the talented player out of the (previously) disastrous franchise” and simply assumed the Blazers were interested in breaking up their core.

Portland proved itself to be far from that prospect.

Knowing the Trail Blazers were going to have little salary cap maneuverability they never wavered from their guys. They entered the season with everyone doubting them, but stuck with Lillard and McCollum. They added a few players through the course of the season and through some injuries — to both CJ McCollum (he came back) and Jusuf Nurkic (he did not after a catastrophic leg injury) — they kept grinding.

Even their coach had some doubts. There were rumors that should the Blazers fire Terry Stotts he would end up in Orlando instead of Steve Clifford. But they stuck with it.

Look at the Blazers now.

Lillard put together one of the most iconic shots in playoff history, ending the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 5 of their first-round playoff series, waving them goodbye on their way out. McCollum finished the Denver Nuggets in Game 7 of the second round with an incredible performance that denied the modern trends in basketball. It was all mid-range jumpers.

Their four-game sweep to the Warriors also helped bolster the Trail Blazers’ reputation. They took double-digit leads in three of the four games and actually led for longer in the series than the Warriors did. But they were unable to finish, running out of gas at the end of games.

There was no shame to them in defeat, even in a sweep.

But like when any playoff series ends, there is plenty of disappointment the season is over. There is frustration they could not make it further because their goals were right there in front of them. But slowly that turns into an appreciation for the journey.

For the Blazers, that journey has to be even sweeter. They as a franchise believed in their guys and their team. They made few changes from that team that got swept last year and now they have reached the Western Conference Finals.

Their record in the past six seasons is impressive — all playoff appearances, four playoff series wins (two this year) and an average of 48.7 wins in the Western Conference. But it is also the exact kind of resume many fans would say you try to avoid.

They are good enough to make the playoffs and get that little high, but not good enough to seriously contend for the title.

This year represented their first conference finals appearance since 2000 and their first playoff series win since 2016. The calls for change were made because they seemed stuck in the middle, the place no one wants to be.

Yet, Portland stayed the course. Even with a veteran team despite constant calls for the team to blow it up and take the risk of starting completely over.

Perhaps it is the unique environment of Portland. As the only major sports team in town (all apologies to the extremely popular Portland Timbers), the Portland Trail Blazers are the kind of team that can sell out their building no matter who they have and how they play. Portland fans embrace their team like few other fan bases in the league.

But it is also a unique part of their organization. They resisted those calls to change and stuck to the players and people they believed in. They have an intensely loyal star in Lillard who did not seem interested in pushing his way out to chase titles. He wants to win in Portland.

It makes sense they want to wrap Lillard up in the dangerous supermax contract and are willing to go into the luxury tax to keep their team together. And Lillard seems to be the kind of guy who wants to make that commitment to Portland.

The Trail Blazers will need some flexibility at some point to keep things moving forward and not truly get stuck. But Portland has found the guys they believe in and are willing and able to invest in them fully.

That is what all the conference finalists did.

They built teams that had their own individual struggles to get to this point. But at a time when they could have turned back or changed, they stuck with them and believed in their progress, making other key changes.

Orlando Magic

In the case of the Toronto Raptors, yes, they made a major change to the roster to take the next step as they acquired Kawhi Leonard. But the Milwaukee Bucks spent years flitting in and out of the playoffs as Giannis Antetokounmpo grew. The Warriors had their own struggles breaking through before Mark Jackson and then Steve Kerr reformed their entire culture and then did it again and made them transcendent.

Rebuilding is different for every team. There are different paths for everyone to travel to find success.

But one thing is constant and consistent. The successful teams find a core and stick with it and believe in it, giving it every chance to succeed and grow.

Sometimes those cores are easy to pick out. A top draft pick and a big free agent are obvious. Sometimes they are harder to decipher and figure out. And sometimes they do reach their expiration date.

But if it is a group that a team can really believe in, they will see through the struggles and keep supporting them.

This was one of the faults of the Magic’s original rebuild project.

The “core 4” players fans had pointed out in young guys like Victor Oladipo, Maurice Harkless and Tobias Harris all got traded away. Plenty of others did not realize their potential. And then the front office got impatient and traded away for veterans that did not pan out.

Certainly, evaluating and selecting talent is a big part of the puzzle. It helps when you have an elite scorer like Lillard or McCollum who can seemingly take over games when everything gets stuck. This is still an element the Magic miss.

But Orlando has to take the lessons from Portland and other successful teams. The Magic must find their core and build around it to be successful. They must be patient if they falter and still maintain their belief in them.

This summer will test some of that belief, of course. The Magic experienced success by making the playoffs and seeing their weaknesses exposed.

But they also had a team that balanced the future with the present. And with big decisions on the horizon, they must decide how they want to develop that future.

But most importantly, they must be willing to invest in the players they believe in. Through thick and thin.