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1. Will the Blazers make the playoffs this spring?
As of this writing, the Blazers are 27–29, good for ninth in the Western Conference. In the old days, this would have had them on the outside looking in. However, in these heady times of the SoFi NBA Play-In Tournament, if the season were to end today, the Blazers would play a home game against the No. 10 seed, and if they win that they would play a road game against the loser of the 7–8 matchup. (The new setup locks in the top six seeds rather than the top eight.)
If they were to win that game, they would qualify for a standard playoff series against the No. 1 seed, likely to be either San Antonio or Oklahoma City. Qualifying becomes much more likely if the Blazers can finish either seventh or eighth. They currently trail Golden State (29–26) by 2.5 games for the No. 8 seed, though the Blazers have a soft remaining schedule full of tanking teams and Golden State’s second-best player, Jimmy Butler, is out for the season with a knee injury.
If the Blazers can stay healthy, they should have a decent shot at playing in a traditional postseason series for the first time since the 2019 Western Conference Finals. (When they qualified for the playoffs in the 2019–20 season, they played in the NBA Bubble at Disney World, and in 2020–21 at Moda Center in front of a half-full building of socially distanced fans.)
2. When will Damian Lillard return and what will he look like when he does?
Barring several concurrent miracles, Lillard won’t play this year while rehabbing a torn Achilles. (If the team were to, say, make it to the Finals, you would have to imagine he might try.)
When next season starts, Lillard will be 36. He’s a 6-foot-2 point guard who has been a turnstile on defense throughout his career. He’ll be bad on defense; the question is whether he’ll be catastrophically bad.
Overall, the bigger worry is probably that he’ll be 36 rather than that he’ll be coming off a torn Achilles, an injury that used to mean a player was done playing basketball and perhaps walking without a limp for the rest of their life but that now regularly sees those who suffer it return to form within a year.
The man who performed Lillard’s surgery, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, more or less personally revolutionized the field by inventing a new method that speeds up rehab to the point that one of his patients, then-Los Angeles Rams running back Cam Akers, returned to the field after five months.
In theory, when Damian Lillard returns at the start of next season, he should look like Damian Lillard. As evidenced by his inexplicable appearance and subsequent victory at last weekend’s 3-Point Contest, at the very least his ability to spread the floor with long-distance shooting should remain—a skill set this year’s team has been desperately lacking.
3. Who will be head coach next season?
The Blazers are in a tough spot until the case against Chauncey Billups, their head coach for the past four seasons until his stunning arrest this fall, winds its way through the legal system. His trial is expected to begin in September.
Billups didn’t resign, and the organization can’t fire him without risking a massive lawsuit. (Many legal experts question the true strength of the federal case against Billups.)
However, even if he were to be exonerated, it is nearly impossible to envision a world where he would be brought back into the fold. The league and its owners would likely be too concerned with the optics (of a national gambling paradigm that they themselves created and profit from) to allow Billups back.
If the situation stretches into next season, it’s anyone’s guess if interim coach Tiago Splitter would want to stay put in coaching purgatory or leave for another team that may decide his track record under trying circumstances has been impressive enough to bring him aboard.
Billups remains listed as head coach on the team’s website.
4. Within a sea of lobbyists and sycophants ruing that the state isn’t business or sports friendly—despite it doing fun things like paying $304,059 annually into the pension of the University of Oregon’s defensive coordinator from 12 seasons ago and earmarking $800 million for a baseball stadium in a liquefaction zone—will a collection of erstwhile progressive politicians at the state, county, and city level surf a wave of economic magical realism over decades of statistical evidence, submit to an AstroTurf deadline, and purposefully negotiate from the weakest position possible out of fear for their own political futures, in the process handing over economic control of a large chunk of the central city to a subprime auto loan/pickleball kingpin in perpetuity?
Yeah, I mean, probably. Don’t you know? That’s just the way things work.
