Exits: The thing about almost
The Trail Blazers have been at the edge of something for eight seasons, to make the last leap they have to be willing to jump.
Nine seasons in a row of playoff appearances is close to a decade of almost.
Almost ascending, almost arriving.
The thing about almost is that it depends entirely on where you’re standing. For the Blazers, for Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum, that’s nine and eight years, respectively, halfway there. Same for Terry Stotts. All that time spent climbing. Fielding game after game, little rushing bursts concerned with getting there. Then, the leaning out and looking over the edge. The deep breaths. Guessing at the distance of the drop, doing those fake-out little wind-up runs right to the lip, getting so close that pieces crumble and fall away underfoot, pulling the brink even closer.
The thing about almost is that you never jump.
When I was 17 I moved to a town two hours outside of the city for the sake of it. A marker, maybe, not of finishing high school because it never meant so much to me that it needed one, but of starting something else. A jump. A lot of people do this, I know.
Outside of the small town was countryside. Long, wide, unbroken pastoral stretches punctuated by rivers and gorges and creeks, even smaller towns. One of my roommates had an ancient and reliable navy blue K-car her father entrusted to her and she’d drive us out to abandoned rail bridges, Mennonite market stands or stretches of long country road just to coast beside undulating fields of bright green spring wheat. The place we returned to most, especially in summer, was a decommissioned limestone quarry. On weekends it was swarmed with people who’d come out from the city to swim and sprawl on the half-crescent sand beach but the slow buzzing weekday afternoons of July and August belonged to the locals and, surreptitiously, to us.
The cliffs that ring around the Gibbous Moon-shaped crater are 40-60ft at their tallest, edging lower toward the sand and a sloping, rocky pathway down to the places you can just wade in. There are signs posted along the tallest cliffs discouraging jumping and, at least then, low-slung chains stretched between posts that hit at the knee you just had to step over, otherwise no real impediments to making it to the edge and flinging yourself off. The quarry was something like 200ft deep, so enough room for impact, but it wasn’t tender, the way the water caught people. The teenagers that did it did it with their shoes on and even then came up howling if they’d hit with anything wider than a pin-drop.
Prevention was guts. Whether or not somebody got up to that height, looked down and over, saw the specks of their friends heads bobbing in the water below, the river beyond the gorge, the tree tops, and still wanted to do it.
We never jumped from the outer cliffs, only the craggier, lower formations, maybe 25ft. But standing there, doing the silent countdowns, picking some imaginary place on the surface where you wanted to land, getting past the countdown and starting again, still required a decision. When you realize you can count forever, make steadying, stalling calculations, but the only way you’re getting off, the only way you’ll go shrieking down and feel the rush of blood sing up into your head, the cool roar of water around your ears as you hit and plummet under, the dumb little triumph of coming up gasping, laughing, proud, is if you jump.
There are plenty of teams looking up at the Blazers and wishing for that kind of continuity. Teams for what to Portland probably feels like a grinding, languishing perpetuity would be a grinning pinnacle.
Again: it’s where you’re standing.
Stotts is already gone so it seems a dumb exercise to wonder what he could’ve made out of an even decade. The urgency, and great challenge now to whoever will come in to replace him, is to make those 10 years getting here worth it to McCollum, to Lillard.
Lillard has always said he’s seen himself in Portland for the long haul, and Stotts was the only coach he’d ever played for, but in the last few years it’s felt like these things have been limiting him. A team can only build to the specifications it understands. Sometimes the whole point of looking outward, and not just within the landscape of the NBA — because we know the limits of staying insular there; we see it in the dwindling coaching pool, or rosters modelled on what worked with another team in an earlier season — but well outside, is to have the framework broken entirely open.
That Lillard can only work with what he has was made frustratingly clear when he brought the Blazers back twice for double OT against Denver in Game 5, only to have both miraculous resuscitations wasted by fumbling teammates. And this is Lillard’s great gift, to try — reaching outside the known bounds to bring the team along, or to further develop as a player. But the whole enterprise will always settle on the mean and so long as Portland stays on the verge, there can be no great leap forward.
It’s going to be a big summer. Jusuf Nurkic, Melo, Norman Powell and Robert Covington could all go. I mean, anyone could go, but those are the guys who can do it on paper. Knowing Powell from Toronto I can say I’d be surprised if he left, his role stands to stay important in Portland but more than that, Powell is a team guy. He went cross-country in the middle of the best season of his career and rounded it out averaging 18.6 points per game with 41% 3-point shooting. He could go anywhere. Lucky for Portland, Powell wants a place to call home, a place where he can bear happily the full weight of franchise trust heavy on his shoulders.
Nurkic was so quiet this season, less the striding, rollicking erratic force he can be, grief taking his legs out from under him before it even got started. Rather than read too deep into his last deflated postgame this season, trust the intuition it showed.
Asked whether he wanted back with the team Nurkic said he wasn’t sure, “In the right situation, yes,” he said, “We’ll see, I don’t know yet because this is not it.”
Knowing something is wrong, in basketball or not, is the whole purpose of the human body. So it would feel great to see Nurkic use his body, and its intuition, as the uninhibited protector of Lillard and McCollum again, flush the lanes for Anfernee Simons to run rabbit-quick down them, provided the situation corrects.
But to correct, a fault needs to be found. As it’s been presented, it wasn’t much with Stotts, who was given the benefit predominantly afforded white NBA coaches in a mutual parting of ways. While biased, it still suggests the burden wasn’t on Stotts, nor did him leaving mean some great, automatic levelling. Unfortunately, given Neil Olshey’s exit interview, it wasn’t on anything else, either.
Olshey said the team’s first round lost “was not a product of the roster” and that anyone coming in to take over as coach was going to have to vastly improve things “without a ton of roster changes”. Despite his penchant for signing new players that do nothing to help this infallible roster, Olshey deflected any blame for his poor decision making, or inability to create any real defensive improvement over eight seasons, on being a small-market team with no pull in the league’s free-agent market. He also called the Blazers the “one of the most winningest small-market franchises in the league”.
So which is it?
There’s a Renata Adler quote I come back to in moments of self-induced panic. Moments where I realize I’ve waited too long on deciding something and have come to take up residence in the median limbo between counting down and jumping.
“I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.”
When Lillard came out publicly endorsing Jason Kidd as the guy he wanted next as coach, he threw a grenade. It was a grenade that absolutely would have blown the team up, and it’s better it proved a dud with Kidd, but it was something meant to propel.
Portland needs a shove. They also need bench depth and a front office that will take accountability and look to teams that have had small-market successes, whether in developing players or bidding up and taking the huge jump. But an understanding that they are at the edge of something and have been for a long time now. At some point you have to stop counting.
Portland fans trust Damian Lillard like their own grandmother. If he wants to jump, we'll jump. Hope Norman Powell stays here net in hand.