Fan How You Wanna Fan
Quick: what’s the FIRST thing that comes to mind when you think about the Portland Trail Blazers? No judgement, and no right or wrong answers.
For me, it’s basketball cards, specifically 1990-91 Hoops (and the more elite Skybox) cards, of which I had MANY growing up. So many, in fact, that I won “longest collection” in first grade when we were asked to bring in 100 of something we owned. It turns out actually having more than a few dozen of a particular thing helps circumnavigate the art table, even if each of them are only 6cm long.
Other things come to mind for me, too: where I was when Greg Oden went down (Block 15 brewpub in Corvallis), watching a playoff-implication game with my friends at their house in my early 20s, being outside of Gill Coliseum on OSU’s campus and getting Brian Grant’s autograph, being at Moda for 0.9. I remember being on a podcast for the first time (shout out to Chris Lucia and the Blazer’s Edge Weekend Podcast). Then doing more of them. Then hosting them. And writing. Oh man, the WRITING. Sometimes it was stressful, like the year I was on pretty much every recap and also live-tweeting games. There was a while when I was stuck to my phone nearly all hours of the day. My fandom had evolved into an obligation, one that I took seriously and that wasn’t always healthy.
I’m sharing all this to make a point: the stuff that shapes each of our relationship to the Blazers is different.
Ask 100 different Blazers fans why they care about the time, or when they first starting watching, or about what comes to mind when they think of the team and you will get 100 different answers. Heck, you’re gonna get MORE than 100, because if you ask folks at different times of day, before games, after games, after a vacation... their OWN answers will change.
The diversity of perspective and experience makes fandom special.
It also leads to disagreement. A lot of it. What’s the best way for the team to get better? What do we think of the coach? Shouldn’t they be doing X? No! They should be doing Y! Actually, no, what they’re doing is fine... but is it?
We disagree about why stuff happens on the court as it happens... or even that it’s happening at all! It won’t take you more than a few back-and-forths debating whether someone is playing good defense - or just kind of LOOKS like they’re playing good defense - to know this disagreement can be draining.
Things brings us to the topic de jour, and the reason why it felt useful to write about this at all: we disagree on what the Blazers are doing right now and what it means. And we have to be okay with that disagreement.
I can be a hypocrite, and this isn’t meant as proselytizing. Sometimes I am talking about something with someone and I completely miss that my base assumption WAY at the root of my argument - something we’re not even talking about - is out of alignment with theirs. And sometimes I pretend like my basketball opinions carry the weight of truth. They do not!
With that in mind, let’s look at two (of many) perspectives I have chatted with folks about over the last few months:
The Blazers are Directionless and Ruining Their Future
Right now, there are fans who are ticked off. This is understandable.
The team now finds themselves with 10th-best lottery odds, as close to 22nd-best odds as they are to 5th. Head Coach Chauncey Billups made a public announcement that third-year guard Sheadon Sharpe was heading to the bench for lack of defensive effort... even though that same lack of effort can be seen in several other veteran Blazers players who get significantly more playing time. Eking out close wins against a Jazz team sitting their best players and the worst team in the league in the Washington Wizards, Portland has tanked their lottery odds (no pun intended) by playing tight, playoff-adjacent rotations of six or seven players, allowing Jerami Grant to at times lead the team in minutes while taking over a dozen shots and making just a third or fewer of them.
What is this team doing?
The Blazers are an Unfinished Product Finding Their Way
Right now, there are fans who are feeling pretty good. This is understandable.
In part due to the ace scouting of former ESPN draft analyst Mike Schmitz, Cronin and company have put together a young team of athletic, long, and ready-to-run players who have found their identity at long last under Billups. Portland stands at 26-33 in a very difficult Western Conference, putting together an extended stretch of top-five defense despite their relative lack of experience as Toumani Camara has emerged as an All-Defensive candidate and is being credibly compared to Scottie Pippen. Add to that a rookie Donovan Clingan who is finding his groove while putting up impressive per-minute defensive metrics for a rookie and an improved Scoot Henderson, and it’s easy to get hyped for the future of a team who also has draft capital in future years from the Lillard (and related) trades.
This team is doing things!
There seem to be fewer and fewer things that bind different people together without question. Following this team is absolutely one of them for a lot of us.
Because of that, we (and I definitely include myself in this “we”) need to allow for different people with different histories, different experiences and different relationships with the Blazers to have different takes about what we’re seeing.
Does that mean we stop discussing and debating? Absolutely not! We need more of this, not less. If we have basketball opinions we feel strongly enough to share with one another, then we should feel comfortable having them challenged without feeling like our reputation, basketball insight, or identity are under threat.
Especially in a losing season like this - one which follows many before - the fact that people whose opinion we respect may land far away from ours should be less an invitation for verbal sparring, and more an invitation to be reminded at how different we really are, yet STILL choose again and again to coalesce around the same thing: our Portland Trail Blazers.
