2021 NBA Offseason In Review: Portland Trail Blazers

Hoops Rumors is breaking down the 2021 offseason for all 30 NBA teams, revisiting the summer’s free agent signings, trades, draft picks, departures, and more. We’ll evaluate each team’s offseason moves and look ahead to what the 2021/22 season holds for all 30 franchises. Today, we’re focusing on the Portland Trail Blazers.

Free agent signings:

Note: Exhibit 9 and 10 deals aren’t included here.

• Norman Powell: Five years, $90MM. Re-signed using Bird rights.
• Ben McLemore: One year, minimum salary. Signed using minimum salary exception.
• Tony Snell: One year, minimum salary. Signed using minimum salary exception.
• Cody Zeller: One year, minimum salary. Signed using minimum salary exception.
• Dennis Smith Jr.: One year, minimum salary. Non-guaranteed. Signed using minimum salary exception.
• Keljin Blevins: Two-way contract.
• Trendon Watford: Two-way contract.

Trades:

• Acquired the draft rights to Greg Brown (No. 43 pick) from the Pelicans in exchange for the Trail Blazers’ 2026 second-round pick and cash ($2MM).
• Acquired Larry Nance Jr. from the Cavaliers in a three-team trade in exchange for Derrick Jones (to Bulls) and the Trail Blazers’ 2022 first-round pick (top-14 protected; to Bulls).

Draft picks:

• 2-43: Greg Brown
  
  • Signed to three-year, minimum-salary contract. First two years guaranteed. Third year non-guaranteed. Signed using mid-level exception.

Contract extensions:

• None

Departing players:

• Carmelo Anthony
• Zach Collins
• Harry Giles
• Rondae Hollis-Jefferson
• Derrick Jones
• Enes Kanter
• T.J. Leaf

Other offseason news:

• Hired Chauncey Billups as head coach to replace Terry Stotts.
• Hired Scott Brooks, Roy Rogers, Steve Hetzel, and Edniesha Curry as assistant coaches; lost assistant coaches Nate Tibbetts, Jannero Pargo, Jim Moran, and John McCullough.
• Newly-hired assistant coach Milt Palacio placed on administrative leave after being accused of defrauding the NBA’s health and welfare benefit plan.

Salary cap situation:

• Remained over the cap and above the tax line.
• Carrying approximately $139.6MM in salary.
• $4,964,742 of taxpayer mid-level exception still available ($925,258 used on Greg Brown).
• Would need to shed salary to use more than taxpayer portion of mid-level exception or any part of bi-annual exception ($3,732,000), since doing either would create a $143MM hard cap.
• One traded player exception ($1,663,861) available.

The Trail Blazers’ offseason:

The addition of Norman Powell at the 2021 trade deadline put the Trail Blazers in position to make some noise in the playoffs — the five-man lineup of Damian Lillard, CJ McCollum, Robert Covington, Jusuf Nurkic, and Powell was one of the NBA’s best down the stretch, and the Blazers drew a fairly favorable first-round matchup, facing a Nuggets team that was missing Jamal Murray.

However, the Blazers couldn’t get past Denver, sending them back to the drawing board this summer. The disappointing finish to Portland’s season also prompted Lillard to do some summer soul searching.

The six-time All-Star professed his loyalty to Portland over and over again during his first nine years in the NBA, but a frustrating 2020/21 season made him question that commitment, if not for the first time then at least more seriously than he has in the past. For several weeks, it seemed as if Lillard might be on the verge of requesting a trade, especially since the Blazers didn’t exactly swing for the fences with their moves in free agency.

Lillard ultimately decided he wanted to remain in Portland, in large part due to the one major change the team did make in the offseason. After parting ways with longtime head coach Terry Stotts, the Blazers chose first-time head coach Chauncey Billups as his replacement.

The move initially received significant push-back from a number fans in Portland due to a perception that the Blazers didn’t look into a 1997 sexual assault case involving Billups as thoroughly as they should have. President of basketball operations Neil Olshey was cagey about the team’s investigation, simply asking fans to trust the organization’s findings and its belief that Billups hadn’t engaged in any wrongdoing.

Despite that shaky start to the Billups era, the team ultimately weathered the PR storm and the new head coach quickly established a strong connection with Lillard, who recommitted to the Blazers after weighing his options for much of the summer.

Of course, Lillard’s decision to stick with Portland came with a caveat — he wants to make sure the front office is doing all it can to build a roster capable of competing for a title. That led to speculation that the capped-out Blazers might make a major splash in the trade market this offseason, perhaps moving McCollum or Nurkic.

Instead, the team was relatively quiet in July and early August, signing Cody Zeller, Tony Snell, and Ben McLemore to minimum-salary contracts while parting ways with free agents like Carmelo Anthony, Enes Kanter, and Zach Collins. The only major move the Blazers made at that point of the offseason was an expected one — they committed to a lucrative new five-year deal for Powell, using his Bird rights to pay him $18MM per year over the course of the contract.

Zeller, Snell, and McLemore are solid veterans, and there was a sense that moving on from offense-first players like Anthony and Kanter might help shore up a defense that ranked 29th in the NBA in 2020/21. Still, it felt like an underwhelming offseason for a front office under pressure to show Lillard it was serious about winning. Even if Billups could make a positive impact, he wasn’t taking over a championship-caliber roster.

Just when it looked like the Blazers’ offseason was over, Olshey ventured into the trade market, getting involved in a three-team trade with the Bulls and Cavaliers in order to land Larry Nance Jr. from Cleveland in exchange for Derrick Jones‘ expiring contract and a lottery-protected first-round pick.

It was a nice bit of business for Olshey and the Blazers. Nance isn’t a star, but he’s an underrated two-way contributor who is on a team-friendly contract (two years, $20.4MM). He gives the team another reliable rotation player who brings plenty of energy and doesn’t need the ball in his hands to be effective. While Nance may not be the missing piece for a title, he increases Portland’s floor and ceiling for the 2021/22 season.

The Trail Blazers’ season:

The Blazers are off to an underwhelming 3-5 start this fall, but their underlying numbers look a little better than that (they have a positive net rating) and Lillard is mired in a shooting slump that presumably won’t last too much longer.

When the dust settles, I expect Portland to finish somewhere in the neighborhood of where they did last season, when they claimed the sixth spot in the Western Conference and were tied with both the fifth- and seventh-place teams.

As that result showed, there’s little margin for error in the West, so the Blazers will need a couple of their bench players – perhaps youngsters Anfernee Simons and Nassir Little – to step up and complement a strong starting five if the team hopes to clinch a playoff spot without going through the play-in tournament.

It’s easy to write the Blazers off as first-round playoff fodder for the conference’s more dangerous teams, but it’s worth noting that Portland made the Western Conference Finals just two years ago in 2019. The team still has enough talent to a win a playoff series or two if everything breaks right. If everything goes wrong, Lillard’s future could become a hot topic again in 2022.

Salary information from Basketball Insiders and Spotrac was used in the creation of this post.