The Portland Trail Blazers have a long history of drafting future stars and helping them blossom in a Blazers uniform. From college goliaths like Bill Walton and Clyde Drexler, to unexpected heroes like Damian Lillard, the Blazers have seen a number of players reach their potential with the franchise. Anfernee Simons and Shaedon Sharpe hope to join that group.
That doesn’t mean they have a perfect track record, however. Over the course of many years as a franchise, they have had players in their building and moved on too soon, only to watch them blossom from afar for another team. Here are seven such players that the Blazers gave up on too soon.
7. The Trail Blazers gave up too soon on Patty Mills
In 2009 the Trail Blazers drafted Australian point guard Patty Mills with the 55th pick, historically a range where you are highly unlikely to find even a rotation player. Other than Mills, the best player drafted with pick No. 55 was…Chris Porter? E’Twaun Moore? The Blazers can be forgiven for not assuming Mills would become a key rotation piece on a title team.
They didn’t exactly give him much of a chance to, either. He played 38 total minutes as a rookie and only 12.2 minutes per game in his season season. He spent most of his time with Portland in Idaho, assigned to the Idaho Stampede of the G-League. He walked in free agency and signed with the San Antonio Spurs.
It was there that he built a long career, sharpening his long-ball and on-ball shot creation. He was in the rotation on the Spurs 2013-14 NBA Championship Team, and played 10 seasons for the Spurs before spending the last two in Brooklyn. He never became a star, but he was a valuable player for over a decade, and the Blazers could have plugged him into their rotation and seen the benefits.
6. The Trail Blazers gave up too soon on Will Barton
A few years after taking Patty Mills in the second round, they took another small-school guard when they drafted Will Barton out of Memphis with the 40th pick in the 2012 NBA Draft. The track record for 40th picks is a lot stronger than pick No. 55, with players such as George Gervin and Monta Ellis going 40th in their respective drafts. Unfortunately for Barton, he didn’t exactly come out of the gates like The Iceman.
Barton averaged 11 minutes per game in his 2.5 seasons to start his career in Portland, hitting just 39.1 percent of his field goals and 19.8 percent of his 3-pointers. It’s understandable why the Blazers decided to move on. Despite natural gifts and flashes of high-level skill, Barton never put it together in Portland.
Some of the blame has to be on Portland’s shoulders, however, because the second he was on another team he blew up into a solid rotation wing. Midway through his third season he was traded to the Denver Nuggets as part of a larger deal for Arron Afflalo and averaged double-digit points from the jump.
Things took off from there, as Barton became a key rotation player and eventual starter on the Nuggets as they became a perennial playoff team. He averaged at least 11 points per game in each of his seven-plus seasons in Denver. For a team that has struggled to find usable wings for the past decade, they had one that they gave up on too soon.
5. The Trail Blazers gave up too soon on Zach Randolph
Initially, Zach Randolph fit the bill for a player the Trail Blazers didn’t give up on. The 6’9″ power forward was drafted 19th overall out of Michigan State in the 2001 NBA Draft, and he averaged just 2.8 points per game as a rookie and 8.4 per game in his second year. Those Portland teams were strong and Randolph didn’t have much of a role.
He bullied his way into the rotation from there, however, breaking out in his third season and averaging 20.1 points per game. He continued his post-scoring and ferocious rebounding for the next few seasons, earning a lucrative contract from Portland.
Unfortunately for Randolph and the Blazers, a number of off-court incidents eroded their belief in him. As Portland faced the music about becoming a rebuilding team, they decided that the best way to handle Randolph was to essentially dump his contract on the New York Knicks.
Randolph spent 80 games with the Knicks and 39 with the LA Clippers before finding his way to the Memphis Grizzlies, where he would put his character concerns and off-court distractions behind him and contribute to winning basketball. He became a beloved and critical member of the Grit ‘N Grind Grizzlies and was named to two All-Star games.
Perhaps Randolph doesn’t find that level of success in Portland, but if they put the right culture around him he could have blossomed and at the very least been more valuable in a trade than simply dead money. He was a really talented player and the Blazers gave up on him way too soon.
4. The Trail Blazers gave up too soon on Drazen Petrovic
Those familiar with Drazen Petrovic and his story know that he died tragically at the age of 28 in a car crash, the midst of a bright basketball career as he became a star for the New Jersey Nets. What many do not remember is that he was originally a draft pick of the Portland Trail Blazers.
Portland took Petrovic, a dynamic guard from Croatia, with the 60th pick of the 1986 NBA Draft. We talked earlier about great players to come from specific picks in the draft; the 60th pick actually has produced its fair share of well-known players, like Isaiah Thomas and Michael Cooper.
Petrovic did not play in the NBA for a few seasons but finally came to the league in 1989. He had a small role on a very good Blazers team as a rookie, appearing in 77 games and proving to be an absolute knockdown shooter. The next season, however, as Portland was going all-in on a push to the NBA Finals (they would make it there and lose to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls) they included Petrovic in a trade for Walter Davis.
Portland got its “win-now” value out of the deal, but in hindsight they got the raw end of the trade. Petrovic positively exploded in New Jersey, averaging 20.6 points the next season and 22.3 the following year; that latter number was 11th-most in the league and earned him an All-NBA spot.
What happened that following summer was tragic, with Petrovic losing his life. Portland obviously didn’t know when they made the trade that would happen, so in the context of how they handled having Petrovic on their team, they certainly gave up too soon. There is an alternate history here where Petrovic has a long career and did so in a Blazers uniform.
3. The Trail Blazers gave up too soon on Fat Lever
Lafayette “Fat” Lever was anything but, a thin and speedy point guard who starred at Arizona State before going 11th overall in the 1982 NBA Draft to the Portland Trail Blazers. He had a solid start to his career, averaging 7.8 points and 5.3 assists per game as a rookie and similar numbers the next year. Portland drafted Clyde Drexler the year after Lever and should have had their backcourt of the future in place.
Instead, the Blazers bailed on Lever after his second season. They packaged Lever with multiple other players and a future first-round pick and sent them to Denver in exchange for Kiki Vandeweghe. Vandeweghe was coming off of back-to-back All-Star seasons as a scoring forward with the Nuggets.
He certainly continued to scorer for the next few years, but Vandeweghe never made another All-Star Game and by his fifth year in Portland had fallen to a 13.9 points per game scorer that they ushered along to the New York Knicks. With Kiki in the rotation they floated around the middle of the pack each season and won a single playoff series. He was a good player, but he didn’t change the face of the franchise.
Lever likely wouldn’t have changed the direction of the franchise either, but he certainly had some big seasons with the fast-paced Nuggets. Lever averaged 17 points, 7.6 rebounds and 7.5 assists per game across six seasons in Denver, making two All-Star Games in the process. He arguably had a better career from that point on than Vandeweghe, so when you factor in everything else they gave up to get him, it’s clear that Portland gave up on Lever too soon.
2. The Trail Blazers gave up too soon on Anthony Mason
Every player on this list played for the Portland Trail Blazers before the team decided to move on, for one reason or another. Anthony Mason will serve as the exception to the rule, and the Blazers decided to give up on him before he ever played a single game.
Portland drafted Mason in the third round of the 1988 NBA Draft, using the 53rd pick on him. If you are sensing a pattern here, you are correct; players taken late in the second round get a shorter leash than those with more draft pedigree. Even so, Portland took that shortened leash and chopped it up, cutting Mason before his rookie season could even begin.
Mason bounced around a few international teams before catching on with the New Jersey Nets in 1989-90. It was until his third season in the league that he got a full-season gig, scrapping his way into a legitimate rotation role with the New York Knicks. He stuck around New York and became a beloved member of their 1990s bully-ball teams.
Mason never became a superstar, but he carved out a role as a reliable two-way player who wasn’t afraid of anyone. The Knicks leaned on him for major minutes, including in 1995-96 when he led the league in minutes per game at 42.2. He would do the same the next year in Charlotte. In 2000-01 he had a strong season for the Miami Heat and made an All-Star Team. That’s the player that wasn’t even worth giving a roster spot to back at the start of his career.
1. The Trail Blazers gave up too soon on Jermaine O’Neal
Jermaine O’Neal was drafted seventeenth overall by the Portland Trail Blazers in 1996, and he joined a really good team stacked with great big men. Arvydas Sabonis, Chris Dudley and Rasheed Wallace took nearly all of the minutes at the big man positions, leaving very little room for O’Neal to find playing time.
That continued throughout the first four seasons of his career, with Sabonis and Wallace starting ahead of him and leaving very few minutes behind them. He never averaged more than 4.5 points per game in those four seasons, nor more than 13.5 minutes per game. That lack of track record is why the Blazers were comfortable trading O’Neal to the Indiana Pacers for a late-career Dale Davis.
Freed from the confines of the loaded Portland roster, O’Neal showed what he had to offer very quickly. He averaged 12.9 points and 9.8 rebounds per game in his first season in Indiana, and then started a streak of six-straight All-Star seasons the next year by averaging 19 points and 10.5 rebounds. He would average 18.6 points and 9.6 rebounds overall while with the Pacers.
O’Neal’s contract extended from there, with cameo stints in Miami, Boston, Phoenix and Golden State. His career started slowly and ended gracefully, and in between, he was a beast inside as a scorer and rebounder.
The Blazers could have used a franchise center during that period of time as their contending stars aged out, but instead, they shipped O’Neal out of town. He is the most painful example of the many times that Portland gave up on a player too soon.