The Portland Trail Blazers’ first game of the 2025-2026 NBA regular season tips off tomorrow at the Moda Center against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
The Blazers’ roster this season consists of several exciting additions, including rookie Yang Hansen. The Blazers selected the 7-foot-1 center from China as the 16th-overall pick in the first round of the NBA draft in June.
Less than a month later, ESPN broke the news that Damian Lillard had agreed to return to the Blazers on a three-year, $42 million contract.
Damian Lillard smiles as he returns to the Trail Blazers in front of fans at the Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland on Sept. 21, 2025.
Joni Land / OPB
The Blazers traded Lillard in 2023 to the Milwaukee Bucks, at his request, after Lillard spent 11 years playing in Portland without winning a championship trophy. Lillard’s time with the Bucks ended after he tore his Achilles tendon during the first-round of the NBA playoffs in the spring.
The start of the Blazers’ new season coincides with an out-of-court settlement that clears the way for the team’s sale to a group of wealthy investors led by Tom Dundon, the owner of the Carolina Hurricanes hockey team.
Last month, the estate of Paul Allen announced it had entered a formal agreement to sell the Blazers to Dundon, pending approval from the NBA’s Board of Governors.
Mike Richman, host of the “Locked On Blazers” podcast, joins us to preview the new season and the hopes and uncertainties lying ahead.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Portland Trail Blazers start their season against the Minnesota Timberwolves tomorrow night at the Moda Center. It has been a whirlwind of an offseason. The team selected Yang Hansen, a 7-1 center from China, as their first round pick, in June. Less than a month later, news broke that Damian Lillard was coming back to the Blazers. And then there’s a question of ownership. An out-of-court settlement recently cleared the way for the team’s sale to a group of wealthy investors led by Tom Dundon, the owner of the Carolina Hurricanes hockey team.
Mike Richman is the host of the “Locked On Blazers” daily podcast. He joins us to preview the Blazers season. Good to have you back on the show.
Mike Richman: Thanks for having me.
Miller: I want to start with something I rarely do as a sports fan whose experience of fandom in sports has largely been formed by the New York Mets who specialize in disappointing me in novel ways most seasons, and that is to actually try to be positive. What is your everything-goes-right scenario for the Blazers this year?
Richman: Well, I think they’re gonna be really good on defense, so let’s start there. They’re a really good defensive team. The offense is somewhere above league average with the emergence of Deni Avdija. And if Shaedon Sharpe takes a step forward, and Scoot Henderson gets really good, and Yang Hansen, the aforementioned young center, is a viable NBA player, all of a sudden, this is like a low-end playoff team that is extremely entertaining through the spring and plays meaningful games for the first time in five seasons when we get to the playoffs.
Miller: OK, but in this best case scenario, your ceiling is making the playoffs, winning in the first round. I mean, if you’re really dreaming big here, we can get to what could go wrong. But I’m trying to be positive here. What’s the ceiling?
Richman: Maybe you invited the wrong guy. [Laughs]
Miller: I think we can talk about joy as well.
Richman: I think realistically, they’re a low-level playoff team. I think even in the most, the rosiest version of them, they’re something like the sixth best team in a very talented Western Conference, and they would start on the road in the playoffs and play a team with true championship aspirations. If you’re wanting them to be really good, it is a year from now as opposed to this particular season, but I do think they’re going to be very entertaining this year.
Miller: OK, which is not nothing when it comes to sports. That’s why we turn to it, among other things. What does the opposite scenario look like? The-wheels-fall-off-the- Blazers’-wagon scenario?
Richman: They really might struggle to score points, which is a huge part of the sport and some would say half. And so I think there’s a world in which their offense just isn’t good. They just cannot score with enough at a competitive level to be particularly good, and that they end up well out of the playoffs. In a year that they were supposed to take a step forward and they were building, they end up clearly by, say, early February, not in the hunt. It wouldn’t be detrimental necessarily, but you want them to start stacking positive seasons. I think that step back would be maybe sobering, in a way that would make the long-term outcome feel pretty bleak.
Miller: Let’s turn to some specific players, starting with the center position. What does Donovan Clingan, who was a rookie last year, look like in preseason games? And I start with him because even though there’s a lot of excitement about the rookie from China, it’s Clingan who is likely to be the starter, right?
Richman: Clingan’s gonna start and play the majority of the minutes at center. He slimmed down. He said that he lost some weight this summer. He’s listed at the exact same weight, so maybe he lost some weight and got a little bit stronger. He’s still 280 pounds, but he’s in better shape. That’s gonna be huge because he’s gonna need to play 28 to 32 minutes regularly and just being able to be on the court that often, last year, was a struggle for him. But he was very good the second half of his rookie season. He’s pretty limited in how he can score, but he’s already a very, very good defensive player. And the Blazers’ identity is that they’re going to be really good on defense, and he is a huge part of that as one of the best young defensive centers in the league.
Miller: What can you tell us about Yang Hansen?
Richman: Oh, he’s so fun. You know, Dave, I don’t know if he’s going to be particularly good at basketball this year, but he is a delightful personality. The Washington Post described him as having the charisma of a YouTube streamer, and I really think that there is something to that. He’s deferential to his teammates. He’s willing to poke fun at himself. He makes sure that his translator, when his translator is skipping steps, says, “no, no, you have to translate that question into Mandarin and you have to translate that Mandarin question into English.” He’s funny at press conferences.
He’s just a really, really fun personality. And if he’s good at basketball, he’s going to be a massive, massive global star because he’s already going to be a pretty big global star and we don’t know how good he’s gonna be at playing in the NBA this year.
Miller: How much playing time are you expecting for him?
Richman: I think he’s going to play the backup center role on night one, at 20 years old. He turned 20 in June, on draft night or the day after. So I think, based on the way the Blazers roster and their health situation is currently, I think he is Donovan Clingan’s primary backup and he’s gonna play something like 12 to 18 minutes in his NBA debut.
Miller: What are the other players that you’re expecting the most from, who are gonna have to carry the most weight, especially at the start of the season, based on injuries?
Richman: I think it starts with Deni Avdija and Shaedon Sharpe. Deni Avdija was probably the Blazers’ best player last season. He was very, very good in the second half of the year after some sort of adjustment, growing pains. He was a new addition to last year’s roster, but he was really, really good to close the season. He’s sort of the engine on offense. If they’re going to be effective, it’s going to be because Deni’s battering ram style helps them do that. And he’ll be the key.
Shaedon Sharpe is a young man who’s 22 and has great promise. He hasn’t put it all together to be a really highly impactful basketball player just yet, but he has a lot of gifts that make you think that day is coming sooner rather than later.
Miller: Jrue Holiday is another new arrival, named by fellow players as The Best Teammate, three separate seasons. According to the NBA, that award is based on “selfless play, on and off court leadership as a mentor and role model to other NBA players, and commitment and dedication to your team.” What have you heard about what he’s like as a teammate? I’m wondering how someone gets this award three different times?
Richman: Well, he changed teams. I think he’s had some new teammates, so that really helps because it’s a new group of co-workers that are like, “this dude is great!”
Miller: [Laughs] So you’re saying the longer someone is at their workplace, the less likely it is that everyone likes them?
Richman: I’m just saying that they’ll be less impressed with your exploits if you’re not a newcomer.
Miller: You brought brownies last week. Yeah, we know that trick now?
Richman: Yeah, I’m sure your coworkers really appreciate you, Dave, and all you do for them. But if you were to, say, switch roles, people would really appreciate the sort of new Dave.
I think he’s just a professional. He knows exactly what he does. He goes about his business and he kind of fits in. He’s the ideal role player because he can fit a lot of different needs. He’s also just a really smart and thoughtful human on top of that. And I think people in any professional workplace appreciate intelligence and the social intelligence that allows you to do the job of an NBA player plus the physical skill. And Jrue is really, really good. He’s one of the best defensive players of his generation, albeit he’s 35 years old now.
Miller: Damian Lillard would actually qualify for a lot of those things in terms of basketball intelligence and social intelligence, one of the most consequential and beloved Blazers players of all time – top two definitely. But he’s not going to be on the court this season. The team brought him back over the summer. He’s still recuperating from a torn ACL. Do you think he’s going to impact the team this year?
Richman: It’s so hard to know with the soft stuff like that. I would say yes, he will. He’ll be around the team, he’ll be invested and like you said, the sort of social intelligence will allow him to be valuable. But the best Damian Lillard plays basketball, he doesn’t watch basketball. So even if he does help the team, I think it’ll be in some ways hard to totally gauge, but he wanted to be back here. Portland means something to him. Wearing a Trail Blazers jersey means something to him. Having Trail Blazers fans root for him in that jersey means something to him.
So I think he will pour into the team as much as he is able, but I think it’ll be a different test for him. How engaged can he stay throughout the grueling NBA season when he doesn’t get to truly participate? I assume a lot, but I think it’ll be a new journey for him.
Miller: I imagine it’d be really hard to just sit there for 82, maybe more, games and not be able to actually be on the court. Has he said publicly about what he thinks that’ll be like?
Richman: I don’t know that he’s discussed it publicly. I know that in a conversation I had with him, he just said, “I’m gonna have to watch a lot of basketball this year.” He was lamenting the reality of how much basketball he was going to have to watch.
I think he’ll know better once we get 10 or 15 games into the season and he realizes what it’s like to travel, be on the plane and do some preparation stuff that is not getting prepared to play. And I think it’ll be hard for him not to be able to put a stamp on things when things go south. I think that’ll be the challenge. On nights where they don’t play well and Damian Lillard can envision himself being the person that could help, I think it will be an interesting adjustment for him. How does he respond to being able to only help with his words?
Miller: Yeah, what does “Dame time” mean, if he’s sitting down?
Briefly, what is the timeline for the new ownership group to take over from Jody Allen, the sister of the late owner Paul Allen?
Richman: They reached an agreement in September to formally purchase the team and now there is no longer a court case hanging over that. So it had been reported previously by The Athletic that the aim was for the end of March. The Athletic then later reported that they hoped to close sooner because of course they do. Once you commit $4 billion to buy something, I bet you want it right away. But yeah, I would assume they aim for the end of the season, try to be involved heading into the offseason. I think the spring is a realistic target date, the end of March.
Miller: Mike, thanks very much.
Richman: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Mike Richman is the host of the daily podcast “Locked On Blazers.”
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