The Delightful, Liberated, Totally Fun Anti-Relevance of the Portland Trail Blazers

The Memphis Grizzlies are drowning in something—maybe tedium, maybe exhaustion, maybe just the tidal force of Matt Barnes' missed jumpers—and every time you watch them, it's hard not to feel like you're drowning too. The same is true of watching the Rockets, who on Wednesday fired head coach Kevin McHale for plotting out game plans that resulted in getting torched by the likes Raymond Felton and Charlie Villanueva. Kevin Durant is battling a hamstring injury, and the Thunder are barely over .500, and that weighs heavily in a similarly uncomfortable way.

That's the price of contention: you're only ever a few losses away from an identity crisis. Everything has to mean something, and you can never escape that context, even in games this early. That's part of the attraction of a Houston or Memphis or Oklahoma City game, even now—that despite what players will tell you postgame about how it's a long season, the games still feel like they matter. They do, and suffocatingly so.

The Blazers are losing too, but it hardly matters. Portland has entered that realm of the NBA's mid-consciousness, a place between the playoffs and the Sixers where rebuilding teams with All-Stars reside, and it's there that they will lose the many games that they'll lose this season. If you were so inclined, you could not watch the Blazers all season long, never form any sort of opinion on them, never glance at their box scores, and still retain your NBA connoisseur credentials. You could avoid them without so much as knowing you were doing it. You would, I think, be missing something free and wild and joyous—basketball played as much like it is on the playground as any team can get away with in the NBA—but you wouldn't regret it. The beauty, here, is that there's nothing really to miss out on.

Portland may make the playoffs a couple years from now, and they could be a very interesting team when that happens. For now, though, they will remain at the bottom of the standings. If there's a difference between the Blazers and an aggressively "rebuilding" team like the Sixers, it's that the Blazers do not stand for anything—there is no evident "Portland Model," and even if there were, no one would be following it, really. The Blazers did not choose to be bad at winning games; LaMarcus Aldridge's departure thrust it upon them.

But they are good at losing games, and in a very particular way. Portland's success or failure does not say anything of significance about the NBA. Maybe Noah Vonleh, Meyers Leonard, and Allen Crabbe will turn out to be good players who help Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum return Portland to the playoffs, or maybe not. For now, it doesn't much matter to anyone, and that's exactly how the Blazers play basketball. There is an offensive scheme here—McCollum and Lillard do a lot of dribbling—and, less noticeably, a defensive one too. But tactics only matter on teams with playoff aspirations. On the Blazers, the system is a placeholder. The called sets happen in the space between the good stuff, and the good stuff is psychotic.

This team flies all over the court, not with urgency so much as glee. Sure they do the same dribble-handoffs and pick-and-rolls that, say, the Spurs do, but, then somehow, at the end of all of that, Lillard is still launching an off-balance jumper from the corner. Between the two of them, Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum shoot as many threes per game as the entire Minnesota Timberwolves roster. As a team, the Blazers are several threes per game off the blasphemous pace of the Warriors and Rockets, but these are not the clinical shots you would see from a contender, or the avant-garde lasers Steph Curry serves up. Portland will shoot any three they want, which may not seem an unusual approach in the Age of Curry, but these are different. Steph shoots a three because it will probably go in, and he wants to win. These Blazers shoot threes because it's super-fun to shoot threes. It's the difference between eating a smart breakfast to start your day off right and waking up and chasing a stack of pancakes with some sausage links.

It's not just attitudinal, of course. The Blazers don't always shoot good shots because you need good players to shoot good shots, and instead of those unqualifiedly good players, the Blazers have Meyers Leonard and Mason Plumlee. I cannot overemphasize how little a Meyers Leonard jump shot means, both to the future of the team or in the present NBA landscape, and you can practically hear Mason Plumlee squealing as he sprints down the court to set up on the block. The heedless insignificance of it all is what makes it such a delight to watch—there are no reasons here but pleasure.

The counterargument to the Blazer's anti-relevance, I suppose, is that Damian Lillard plays for the Blazers. But this is a different Lillard than the one you know from playoff games and buzzer-beaters. That Damian Lillard was the second-best player on a fringe title contender, and those buzzer-beaters meant something. This Damian Lillard will shoot the same threes he shot for those Blazers, but those are no longer the only ones he shoots. He wore that pressure well—better than almost anyone in the league, in retrospect. But this Damian Lillard opts out of the whole pressure paradigm. There are no stakes for the modern Blazer. There are only 27-foot jump shots, forever and ever amen.

The Blazers are definitely bad, and more than a little crazy, but what an enormous relief it is to watch them. Last week, they were up 20 late in the game on the Grizzlies, who were trudging up and down the court with all of the pleasure of someone enduring a midweek rush hour commute. I thought for a minute that maybe this was why the Blazers were winning, something like the basketball equivalent of the principle of least interest. Then Al-Farouq Aminu bricked a three that felt like a rebuke, and I revised. The Blazers are interested in winning, but for a few happy spells each game, they may forget what that means. Those are the best parts.