The Portland Trail Blazers have only won 11 major NBA awards as a franchise, with the last coming by way of CJ McCollum taking home Most Improved Player back in 2016.
It’s high time they brought some more hardware back to Rip City, and there’s a good amount of candidates for the upcoming season.
Chauncey Billups could make history by winning Coach of the Year in his rookie season at the helm. The squad has the pieces to make a major improvement in the win column. If he can lead the Blazers to a top-five seed in a loaded Western Conference, he might be able to get the nods depending on how the team gets there.
The Portland Trail Blazers most likely to win each major NBA award
Of course, Billups winning Coach of the Year is certainly a longshot. Portland is better served looking for one of their players to bring home a trophy — hopefully along with the Larry O’Brien.
1. MVP – Damian Lillard
Damian Lillard has been a dark-horse contender for Most Valuable Player for nearly half a decade. Each season, though, it seems to fall just outside of his grasp. Could this be the year that he’s finally anointed the best player on the season?
Lillard has an ideal situation to bring home the Maurice Podoloff. He’s on a good, not great roster, without an All-NBA running mate as many of the other perennial candidates have at their disposal.
If Lillard goes ballistic in Chauncey Billups’s new motion offense, averages 30+ points a night like he did in 2019-2020, and leads the Blazers to homecourt advantage in the playoffs, while the other candidates are hindered by the brilliance of their own second options, he could certainly come away with the most votes. He’s certainly the only one who has a chance to do it on the Blazers.