A disappointing season leads to questions.

The Portland Trail Blazers finished their 2023-24 season yesterday with their 61st loss, leaving them in last place in the NBA Western Conference, tied for third worst in the entire league.

After trading All-NBA guard Damian Lillard in the off-season, the Blazers were destined for a rebuilding year. Under a wash of injuries, intermittent execution, and suffering through a young and unprepared bench pressed into heavy-duty action, they wilted. Watching them in the second half of the season held all the charm of eating a raw artichoke.

Rebuild or no, it was not supposed to be this bad. You don’t acquire Deandre Ayton, re-sign Jerami Grant to a large contract, and draft the hottest point guard prospect in existence in order to win 21 games, with many of the losses becoming atrocious blowouts. The Blazer’s Edge Mailbag—usually a reliable barometer of the mood of Portland fans—is overflowing with laments, fears, and questions. Precious few solutions are being offered, likely because few people can see a clear path forward from the current juncture. That’s unusual.

This is not the lowest point in franchise history. 2005, the coda of the Jailblazers Era, was worse. Portland had drafted under-performing Sebastian Telfair a year earlier. He was expected to mesh with veterans Zach Randolph and Darius Miles, with youngsters Martell Webster and Jarrett Jack mixing in somehow. That squad would go on to win 21 games, the same record as the current club. They were just as directionless, appearing just as despondent from the outside. They had no Lillard Era to look back on either, just half a decade of frustration and public relations disasters.

That iteration of the franchise was saved by the 2006 NBA Draft, in which they acquired Rookie of the Year Brandon Roy and perpetual All-Star LaMarcus Aldridge. A year later they’d win the 2007 NBA Draft Lottery and the right to select generational center Greg Oden. Ongoing injuries to Oden and Roy prevented the new Blazers from forming into the super-team they were destined to be, but the cumulative acquisitions—and buzz surrounding them—served as a cardiac-paddle jolt to the heart of the ailing community.

The Blazers will get a premium pick in this summer’s draft as well. They have a little over a 13% chance of winning the first-overall selection. The odds indicate they’ll select sixth or higher. They’ll also get Golden State’s mid-round pick unless something wacky happens.

The problem is, there’s no savior on the horizon in the 2024 NBA Draft. Alex Sarr—the current projected #1 pick—is a prospect center who plays the same position as Ayton. Zaccharie Risacher is a shooting small forward only loosely projected as a star. Nikola Topić plays point guard, the same as Scoot Henderson, Portland’s latest draft pick. Ron Holland and Matas Buzelis play forward for the G League Ignite, but nobody is projecting either as the solution to an NBA franchise’s problems.

If they select well, the Blazers will get a good piece out of the draft. They already have plenty of pieces. Their roster is a big box of leftover Legos that might have belonged to a set once, but are now sitting, waiting to be put together coherently. They don’t just need a blueprint, but a master to put it all together.

There’s been no evidence that this genius resides on staff at the moment. Head Coach Chauncey Billips and General Manager Joe Cronin are inexperienced, as is owner Jody Allen. Billups has had three years of chances to put together a winning season. With or without Lillard, he has yet to do so. Cronin has been given the unenviable job of transitioning between eras, dismantling Lillard-based assumptions while growing into a new, unknown future. We don’t have tangible results yet; the experiment is still new. But Henderson—Cronin’s first swing at the big time—underperformed during most of a raw rookie season. Assistant General Manager Mike Schmitz appears to have found diamond-in-the-rough players in Toumani Camara and Dalano Banton, but we have no idea how either plays on a coherent, functioning team when opponents are actually trying instead of yawning their way to another predictable win.

In short, this may not be the lowest moment in franchise history, but in pure basketball terms, it’s up there. Or down there.

Rehearsing this is not an exercise in doom and gloom, though a true post mortem of the season would include plenty of both. Pulling back the veil reveals the only thing that’s going to get the Blazers out of this mess: a true #1 option, a star to lead the team into its next era. They need their next Brandon Roy, Damian Lillard, or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Why mention the latter? A couple years ago, the Oklahoma City Thunder won 20 games in a season too. This year they won the West.

The great hope is that it can happen that quickly. OKC did it. Portland has done it before. The great caution is that nothing else is going to substitute. The Blazers can’t pull in decent prospects and unknown contributors and expect to ascend the NBA ranks. That kind of player will help the long-term infrastructure, but transmission and chassis don’t find their purpose until the vehicle has an engine.

As we’ve often repeated, non-marquee teams like the Blazers don’t find superstars in trade or free agency. They have to draft excellence in order to achieve it. That’s going to put perspective on this summer’s moves. They probably need to think about trading veterans like Jerami Grant and Malcolm Brogdon, but they’re not going to find their answer that way. At best, they’re going to keep momentum going. So, too, with preserving cap space. Portland would be foolish to gum up their future ledger with players who won’t take them to the top. But cap room has no target yet. They’re not preserving it for a definite move, rather for hope that one will become evident when it’s time.

This is not an ideal position. Cronin and company will be forced to make decisions without being able to benefit fully from them yet. The best they can do is stockpile future options, then hope prospects look brighter when it’s time to execute them.

Fortunately, it’s not a high-pressure position either. Whatever the Blazers do (or don’t do) this off-season, it won’t make or break them. They’ll come back next year looking for the same things they sought this past fall: experience for their young players, chemistry for the team, signs of forward progress. They didn’t get any of those things definitively this year. It’s been a lost season that way. But hope springs anew each opening night.

That’s what the Blazers and their fans have to settle for right now. Revival will not be an overnight process. They’re going to need a draft—more likely 2-3 drafts—to find their next primary player. The moves they make in the meantime will matter. They don’t want to start from scratch in their new star’s rookie season. But until that player arrives, they’re decorating walls and tables without turning the lights on for the party.

“Superstar or Bust” sounds like a pedantic conclusion. It seems like analysis should be more nuanced than that. But if you look back to Bill Walton, Clyde Drexler, Rasheed Wallace, Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge, and Damian Lillard, that’s the way it’s always been. The Blazers have some good players. The Blazers have some young and promising players. The Blazers don’t have anyone on the roster like that. It’s not the only litmus test that matters, but it’s the one that brings the others significance.

If that player isn’t available in the 2024 NBA Draft, Portland will have to hope he shows up in 2025. They’ll almost certainly have another prime pick that summer. If not, they can look forward to pick swaps and first-rounders from the Milwaukee Bucks as the decade closes. Somewhere in there they need to strike gold. That’s beyond doubt, The only question is, how long it’ll take them to get there. Either way, I suspect you’re not going to have to ask when the Blazers are emerging from this dip. It’ll be obvious. You’ll know it.

Here’s hoping that franchise-changing electricity renews soon and that, in the meantime, Portland’s current players can get a lot healthier and a little more cohesive.