 What's the word y'all? The Portland Trail Blazers are back in No Man's Land. This feels like a video we make every single year. This is not new to them and their organization, but boy, we gotta chat. They started off the season 10 and four, one of the best records in the Western Conference. They had one of the best defenses. And since then, if my math's correct, they are 11 and 21 since that 10 and four star. And last night, last night they blew a 24 point lead to the Lakers? Shout out to the Lakers, man. At this point, we kind of grown accustomed to seeing LeBron Jays put up 30 plus points since he turned 38, which is crazy. But of course, Thomas Bryan was the real show with his stat line and his field goal percentage. They said on the broadcast, the only other player in Laker history to do that similar stat line with that field goal percentage was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And Thomas Bryan is doing that. He's been doing it. He's been amazing. And that was a big win for the Lakers being down that much. Cause I didn't watch this game live. I was screaming, twist.tv slash KLT for a cue. I fired up cause the Lakers game was boring. They went into halftime down by 24 points. And I'm like, okay, this is over. Let's go ahead and play some FIFA. And I'm playing FIFA. I'm being bad at it. And then the chat is like, the Lakers are coming back. I thought they was capping. So I look at the stats. They're like, it's like a two point game. I'm like, oh no. So the Portland Trailblazers were up by 24 points at one point and lost by nearly double digits. They lost by nine points. So what I did is I woke up this morning and I'm like, how the hell did they blow this game? So I watched it. But no man's land, man. No man's land is where they're residing. You know, it's a bit weird. And before we even talk about the things that's going on, can I quickly defend myself? Because this is something that happens way too often. I'm just gonna use the Portland Trailblazers as an example. When they started off the season 10 and four, right? If you watch our podcast, you know, I was a bit skeptical about the start. If you remember, Jeremy Grant hit a game winner. Anthony Simon to the game winner. Josh Hart hit a game winner. They hit three game winners in a span of like a week and a half. And you win those games, those that counted as dubs. But I went onto the podcast and said, I need to see more. I need to see a longer stretch. And boy, my mentions was, oh, can he never get Trailblazers? No love, boom, boom, boom. I'm gonna say this again for the millionth time on this channel. I try to make these videos and make my NBA opinions and stuff as objective as possible. Of course I don't shoot 100%, nobody does. But what I saw with the Portland Trailblazers during that stress didn't seem sustainable. I didn't think the defense that was anchored by use of nuggets was gonna continue to be top 10. I didn't think that they were gonna continue to hit game winners throughout the course of the season. I didn't think they were gonna be this bad though. But in the moment I was giving y'all these real reasons why I didn't think that start was realistic. I feel like I was public enemy number one on Trailblazer Twitter because of that. And like, you know what I'm saying? So I'm just, I'm not, this is not like a victory lap. Oh, they're bad. See, I'm right. I'm just saying like, I don't have a hatred for any organization like ever. This is my job, ladies and gentlemen, to try to be objective as possible when I'm talking about basketball. So even if I don't talk about your team enough, I get that a lot too. Oh, you don't talk about our team? That don't mean I don't like y'all. It just ain't really been a way for me to bring it into conversation. You know what I'm saying? So back to the Trailblazers because again, it hasn't been good since that great start. And listen, it's a candy for real video. So you know, we gotta talk about moves and changes because that's what we're obsessed with on this channel. The Portland Trailblazers have one timeline. And that timeline is Damien Lillard. They have the greatest player in their franchise history actively on their roster and still playing great basketball. And again, I'm not a guy that's gonna ever come on here again and talk about Trey Dame until this man tells the world himself that he wants to be traded. So their timeline is put the best team around Dame so we could get him in a position to win a championship. They made one conference finals run with C.J. McCullum. They shipped C.J. McCullum out the dough maybe a year or two too late but they finally did it to build this roster. And this roster in itself is a pretty, pretty new roster for Dame. Josh Hart hasn't been there for more than a season to have Jeremy Grant was this season acquisition. Drew Eubanks knew Shayton Sharp, Gary Payne. These are all people that haven't been there very long and still felt like there was a hard ceiling on this. I actually really liked their starting lineup on paper between Dame, Simon, Josh Hart, Jeremy Grant and Youssef Nurkic. I thought it was cool but now we started looking at that depth and Drew Eubanks was the better center last night against the Lakers but he's an undersized center at six nine. Shayton Sharp is, was he the youngest player drafted in this year's draft? Of course he's going to go through hot streaks, cold streaks or whatever. Gary Payne the second is finally getting a real PT after missing a great majority of the season and Nazir Liddle was finally back and he was one of the best players last night. He only played 13 minutes. So what do they possibly do to get them out of this no man's land to help Dame and Liddle? Cause again, I mean the easy thing to do is say a trade Dame, do this, do that. And now we, we just thinking about it differently. I'm going to be honest with you the Trebleys are our team. I'm going to keep it rooted for the season because the Bulls pick is old to the Orlando Magic and the Trebleys' pick is old to the Bulls if they make the playoffs but right now they ain't making a playoffs. They, they ain't doing it. And things get ultra weird when you start talking about the salary cap, the luxury tax and all of that because it feels pretty, pretty obvious that they're going to attempt everything in their power to bring Jeremy Grant back. He's been an amazing pickup for him for them. I mean, he went through a stretch where he was averaging like 25 points per game when they were still doing solid basketball stuff. But like Josh Hart is up for a new contract because he's got like a player option and he's making pennies on a dollar for what he could potentially make on the market. And if you decide that you want to get Jeremy Grant his money because he's going to be worth, weren't a lot of money and you try to get Josh Hart his money now you're into the luxury tax on a team that's sub 500. So that feels like something that the ownership wouldn't want to do. So what do you do instead? You find a new home for Josh Hart so you can make something out of what he's making before you just leave him in free agency. I think one of the mistakes that they made in the last couple of off seasons was extended use of Nurkitz. I know that they basically had no alternative when it came to that center position. So yeah, here's a new contract use, but like he hasn't, he hasn't been good. He's a really cool dude from every account I've heard but like he just hasn't been good. And the best verges of what the Portland Trailblazers have been is when they were spamming pick and roll with Dame and Nurkitz. And if you look at their pick and roll percentage it's down like 14% this season compared to the other seasons. And part of that is because well now we got Anthony Simons. We brought Anthony Simons in on a four-year, $100 million contract. We can't just have him spotting up all the time. He also has to do some of the stuff with the ball in his hand. So now Dame and Lula pick and roll possessors are going down. And that means use of Nurkitz's value as a player is going down as well. Again, they have big body, Thomas Bryant having the game of his career and they couldn't play use of Nurkitz. They couldn't play him. They decided to go with the six nine Drew U banks on him because that was their best option. And we'll address the biggest elephant in the room is that the Dame Anthony Simons together at the time hasn't looked good. It just hasn't looked good. And I don't have the numbers to prove that or whatever but it feels like Anthony Simons is more effective when he's not playing with Dame. And Dame is more effective when he's not playing with Anthony Simons. And you have to figure it out because you gave Anthony Simons his money. And I'm not saying they won't be able to figure it out. I mean, this is their first season to playing together and Anthony Simons has not 24 years, he's a 23 year old young NBA player. So I didn't expect these two to come in and look like Dame and CJ did because it took years upon years upon years for Dame and CJ to look like that backcourt together. And they just ain't had it so far. Chauncey Bellups after last night's loss said that they're gonna look into every option to potentially change the team. And he meant like rotations and starters and stuff like that. But as I look at this roster I don't see what that can be to maximize to get them in a place that they really wanted to be. Like Joe Cronus said before the season not publicly or like he came to the mic and said we're not a championship team. But he said that they're just gonna try to progressively get better. And that sound like somebody that's not looking at their roster as a contender. We could see this roster. We know that they're not a contender but them being the 13th seed is something that they didn't prepare for either. Is it in the best interest to maybe lose so you could get another lottery pick? Probably, probably. But if you look at the roster that they have if we talking about swinging foot offenses and getting another star to put along side Dame again, we don't know who that star is on the market. There's not a lot of stars on the market at all in this year's trade at least yet. But like again, we talk about Josh Hart's contract extensions and how they probably won't be able to afford that. If you really want to get ballsy and you want to put Dame in the best position to do Dame stuff. Are you coming in or? Okay, well, I guess Koba's filming this video too. If you want to put Dame in the best, best position and you want to get him a secondary star the Josh Hart, Shane Sharp. These are people that would be valuable. I mean, even Anthony Simons, like my boy Derek is a Bull's Blazer Spurs fan. And for the last month or so, he's been trying to tell the people he wants to see an Anthony Simons, oh, Giada, no betrayed. That is the way you write the ship. And I didn't think after what Anthony Simons showed last season shooting a 40% from three and when Dame went out basically being the engineer at offense, even though they weren't good that just as fast that, not that they're changing up on him, but they'd be willing to throw him in an additional trade. But again, Derek's mindset is, hey, Dame is our timeline. And Oceana Nobby probably fits what Dame needs to do or what the team needs more than what Anthony Simons does. But I can't look at that like Anthony Simons, Sharp, these are some young players that if I would hit the reset button and I have a star player of a DeMar deRose and or Pascal, I don't know, I'm just saying these are the players that are closest to maybe, but I doubt it. Those are people I'd be interested in. That boy Sharp looks good. He looks sharp out there, you know what I'm saying? And me at times. And he's also super young. Anthony Simons showed that he can shoot 40% on a high clip, moving threes and not just catch a shoot really, really well. But ultimately, another thing that really boggles this team down is how small they are. The only person above seven foot or seven foot or close to it is Yusuf Nurkic. Again, Drew, U-Banks is six nine and nobody else on the team is six 10. They're a small team. And I don't feel like other than again last night that they've been getting dogged by these bigger, bigger players, but it does matter. It does matter having that lack of size. You can't even tell there's a dog in there, can you? You can't even see them. Now here are the next couple of games for the Trailblaze. It's against the Spurs tonight, good redemption game against a team that isn't actively trying to win basketball games. The Utah Jazz, the Toronto Raptors, the Atlanta Hawks, the Grizzlies, the Wizards, like their schedule is not super easy. It's also not super tough. So, I mean, they have Damien Lillier who is still putting up crazy numbers, 50 points and a loss, 47 points and stuff like that. They could win more games, but again, even if they do end up making a run and getting into the playoffs, we know what the ceiling is on this team and it's not extremely high.