Scoot Henderson had plenty of vocal supporters when the Portland Trail Blazers drafted him No. 3 overall in the 2024 NBA Draft (the author of this article being one of them, to be fair). Podcast mogul Bill Simmons was one of them. A few weeks after the draft, Simmons made his stance pretty clear on the Blazers' then-new point guard:
"He's going to be a f****** star. Like, people can cut this out, they can put it with like Titanic music five years from now. I'm gonna be right. This guy's a star. He f****** has it. I will fight you to the death if you disagree with me. Like, he has it. He just has it. I've been watching basketball my whole life. I know who has it and who doesn't."
Well, I won't overlay that clip with Titanic music... Maybe split screen it with footage of the Titanic sinking, though. Almost three years later, Simmons' revised scouting report on Scoot Henderson is pretty representative of Blazers' fans view of Scoot going forward: there's obvious hope that he becomes a positive player, but the star ceiling might not be realistic anymore:
"He has a really, really high defensive guard ceiling... I think he's a physical defender who actually cares about guarding people. He can beat people off the dribble and get to the basket. What he's not is what I thought he was gonna be, which is like a Derrick Rose-type of athlete getting to the rim..."
I won't bash Simmons for being outwardly excited about Henderson because, well, we were all on the same page. A few years later, it's okay to admit that pretty much the entire basketball world miscalculated the kind of player he'd become.
Scoot Henderson's perceived ceiling is defensive-minded role player
For the record, that's still an important type of player. Defense-first backcourt players who can occasionally create their own shot often have long, productive NBA careers.
But it is telling that the perception of Henderson — from Simmons and others within NBA media — has fallen this far. I actually think that Blazers fans who watch him every night remain slightly higher on his prospects, but that's semantics rather than a fundamental difference in opinion.
At 22 years old, there's no reason to give up on Henderson. Blazers fans have seen first-round draft picks develop at a snail's pace before, like Anfernee Simons, who was mostly a non-factor for three years before coming a 20-plus point per game scorer starting in year four. Fans shouldn't hold onto hope of a star turn for Scoot, but the version of Henderson that Simmons described would actually be an okay outcome at this point.