Soobum Im-USA TODAY Sports The season’s going nowhere. Why not just develop youngsters? The Portland Trail Blazers have lost 9 straight games, posting an “0-fer” in the month of February. Their 15-42 record makes it painfully obvious that they’re not going anywhere this season. Maybe not next season either. Just as obviously, the team has other priorities than winning at this point, a fact made clear in today’s Blazer’s Edge Mailbag submission. Dave, Here’s my plan for the Blazers. Feature the young guys in the game plan. Let them run the show, play through mistakes, and learn a system. Hopefully by the end of the year you know which guys are worth investing in further and, even though we stink, the young guys are ready to play Blazer Basketball next year. Use Brogdon and Grant as mentors but they aren’t there to drag this team to the playoffs, they are teaching young guys the right way to do things as pros. Brogdon is surely gone by the deadline and we’d at least take offers on Grant. End the year with some sense of which young guys, especially the wings, have a future here or at least enough promise to keep for phase 2. Hope for development from the young guards. Add a high draft pick plus whatever you get from the vets and put it all back in the oven for another year (yeah, I know I’m mixing metaphors here.) Jonathan Your plan is a decent middle-of-the road option. It’s far more likely than the franchise blowing it up and recycling their roster, firing their coach and GM, or selling to a new owner, as many submissions suggest. Those things many yet happen, but not yet. I want to pick up on one particular strain, which has been echoed in many suggestions. Lots of people think the Blazers should just bench the veterans at this point, letting the young players get unlimited run in the name of experience and evaluation. Portland has pursued a similar tactic over the last couple seasons, tanking while doing so. Plenty of folks are calling for a repeat. This year is different, though. Over the past two seasons, franchise fortunes hung on Damian Lillard and whatever veterans the front office assembled around him. Young players were a small part of that plan, but not intrinsic to it. No matter who the Blazers played in the final 40 games of the year, those players would fill bit parts around Lillard and the stalwarts when the team started competing for real again. Lillard is gone now, along with almost every other veteran from his era. Portland’s young players aren’t additions to the plan anymore. They ARE the plan. Whatever happens in the final stretch of the season doesn’t just affect them, it affects the franchise’s future through them. Getting them quality experience matters. It won’t be the only factor determining their fate, or the fate of the team, but it’ll have far more ramifications this year than it did during the prior seasons’ tank-fest. It’s not just that these young players develop. How also matters. We should also acknowledge that veterans are key in the development of young players. People seem to think that court time is magical for its own sake. More minutes on the floor don’t automatically equate to proper growth as a veteran NBA player. Young guys can pick up bad habits as well as good. They can grow in the understanding of their own abilities without learning a thing about how their play fits into a coherent, winning system. That’s why veterans come in handy. They understand more about setting up the team, and their teammates, for success. They may not be talented enough to bring it to fruition on their own, but they can at least point in the right direction. Think of a team a little bit like an orchestra. Let’s say the ensemble is 85% first-year instrumentalists, 15% experienced. Even if you have some hotshot tuba player behind your First Chair veteran player, there’s good reason not to dump the remaining 15% for rookies. Orchestras have to play together. Rehearsal habits, staying on beat, listening to others and shaping your tone accordingly...these things matter. If everybody’s out there just blat-blatting without watching the conductor, picking up the nuances of the music, and staying in time, you don’t really have a band. The veteran instrumentalists keep everybody else in rhythm, help them interpret dynamics, and so on. So, too, with guys like Malcolm Brogdon and Jerami Grant. They may not be able to turn around games for victories, but they’re prominent, talented, experienced players. They know where to be, how to move, what the plays are supposed to look like, how a defensive rotation is timed, when to take their own shot or pass, and a thousand other musical interpretations that the young guys haven’t picked up yet. When veteran players are on the court, everyone else can move around them. They won’t be perfect, but at least they’ll have some guardrails and guideposts to steer by. Without any veterans, it’s the blind leading the blind out there. The youngsters might figure it out eventually, but their reps and habits in the meantime won’t be as solid, which means their development will take longer. Eventually, Portland might throw in the towel completely and just go with an all-first-year squad. If they do, I expect that to happen much later in the year, if at all. For now, they still need Grant and Brogdon so players like Scoot Henderson, Shaedon Sharpe, and Jabari Walker have someone to pass to (and from), defenders to help (and be helped by), and actual plays to run. Thanks for the question! You all can send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to get to as many as we can! Source: https://www.blazersedge.com/2024/2/28/2 ... -henderson