The Portland Trail Blazers currently find themselves in an awkward spot in the NBA standings. A team that came into the season with championship aspirations, or at least expecting a deep playoff run, is currently smack dab in the middle of the Western Conference in terms of record.
The Blazers are sitting at 9-8, good for seventh in the West — which would have them just missing out on a guaranteed playoff berth. This isn’t too concerning, since they’re just a game behind the fifth-place Dallas Mavericks.
In fact, many of the predisposed “title contenders” find themselves in similar situations to Portland. The Los Angeles Lakers are right behind them at eighth in the West, and the Eastern Conference isn’t stacking up the way pundits initially expected at all. The Chicago Bulls and Washington Wizards currently hold two of the top three seeds, while the Milwaukee Bucks and Philadelphia 76ers would compete in the play-in tournament if the season ended today.
A strange early season could make for a difficult to navigate trade landscape for the Portland Trail Blazers
During the course of a season, the teams most likely to make a trade are squads on the lower end of the playoff bracket, clubs just on the outside looking in, or bottom-feeders hoping to sell off their veteran talent for future assets.
This season, the teams that were expected to land in each respective category have been flipped on their heads a little.
Teams like the Bucks and Lakers probably weren’t expecting to need to make many adjustments to their roster, as they should have anticipated to lead their individual conferences.
The Bulls and Wizards should have either been one major piece away from true contention or possibly needing to blow it up entirely, depending on how their seasons started. So far, though, each team should stay the course and not fix something that isn’t broken.
Of course, it’s still early in the season, but nearly a quarter of the way through, the contenders and pretenders are starting to make themselves known.
As currently constructed, the Trail Blazers are pretenders. They seem to be starting to put things together on both ends of the court, but at the end of the day, this roster is not of championship caliber.
If you’re not truly contending, and you’re not rebuilding, what are you really trying to accomplish?
Regardless if Portland rights the ship on defense and returns to the median in terms of their atrocious road splits, this team will need to make a major move if they plan to fight for the title.
The question is, with this weird early start to the season, which teams would be willing to play ball?