The Portland Trail Blazers ended their 2025-26 season last night with a 114-95 loss to the San Antonio Spurs in the first round of the 2026 NBA Playoffs. There will be plenty of time to let the offseason sink in. Today we’re going to take time for an immediate, though right-brained, question from the Blazer’s Edge Mailbag.
What would you say to this team following the losses we just went through? I guess in a way I’m asking for your take on the season but I want to know how you’d say it to the players?
Hello, fellow Dave! Nice to have you around. Thanks for being part of the Daves we know, we know.
I am not a coach. Nothing I say to the players would matter, really. I don’t understand enough, haven’t experienced enough, and don’t have the standing to speak to a locker room of NBA professionals. Every member of the Blazers coaching staff has forgotten more about basketball than I’ll ever know. So I don’t feel entirely comfortable taking the place, role, or voice of someone in that position.
In the spirit of the question, though, I’ll share a couple things. Just take them as me talking to you and our readers about what I think rather than me talking to the Blazers players themselves.
I think, honestly, I’d congratulate the players on a fairly decent season and thank them for the work they’ve put in under trying circumstances. That’s the most important thing.
Then I’d ask a question. Is that it? Because we could stop there and go home and that’d be a fine ending to the year. But they have to choose what they want. Do they want a happy feeling, a perfectly-proper end to a mildly-successful season by their own standards? If we want to keep measuring the team against its own expectations, we can keep finding ways to celebrate what we’ve done and feel good about ourselves.
Or do they want to do well, to succeed in absolute terms? Because we’ve entered the playoffs now, and as we just found out, the playoffs (and the opponents in them) absolutely do not care about your standards, aims, or pats on the back. They care about shoving you away from rebounds, sticking basketballs in your chest, and winning. If you aspire to be a playoffs team, let alone succeed there, you have to prepare for playoffs terms.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean remembering that we did pretty good (for us) given all the injuries and roster building and coaching changes and all that. You have to tuck that stuff away in a corner of your mind. That’s perspective for when you’re retired, when you’re 60 and looking back on all of this, summing it up.
If you want to talk about 2026-27, you have to remember that another team just handed your ass to you and celebrated while they were doing it. You have to ask yourself whether you like that feeling, whether that’s something you want to repeat. If you do, go ahead and unpack the contents of that retirement room and decorate your walls and shelves with the pats on the back and pretty-goods. That’s your home now. That’s what your NBA experience will amount to.
But if you don’t like that experience, if you don’t want to watch teams celebrating against you for the rest of your career, you have to remember how angry you were about that when it happened and how you didn’t, or couldn’t, do anything about it. And you have to vow to never let that happen again.
Actually, the vow’s not the thing. That’s a big-picture view. Life doesn’t work like that. You operate inside a big picture, but you can’t progress by trying to leap outside the frame and master the whole thing. You can’t toss a can of paint at a canvas in a moment and emerge with a Rembrandt. Real progress comes in inches, in each small brush-stroke that makes up the portrait, in mastering the time and technique that being good requires.
You get married one day, but that doesn’t mean squat when it comes to spouse-ing. You know what does? When you get up the next morning and you learn, fight, struggle to be a damn good spouse. When you take out the garbage, listen to stories you don’t want to, change your dinner plans or hygiene habits or career plans because whatever you thought you brought to the table doesn’t matter as much as making it work with this person across the table from you.
You have a kid one day, but that’s not what parenting is really about. You become a real mom or dad when you walk your kid back and forth, holding them as they cry all night because they have a fever. When you come home after a long day’s work and sit down to do two hours of stupid new math with them because they don’t get it and neither do you. When you suffer with them through depression and heartache, dreaming and falling, not being able to control a damn thing but still committed to being there with them every day because it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do.
What you thought you were means much less than you presumed. What you’re called to do in each little moment shows everything about who you are. That’s how life works.
It’s how basketball works too. You can’t promise today to never get beaten again. That’s meaningless. The determination to get over losing gets lived out in every practice, in every film session, in setting picks precisely, in scrapping for loose balls harder than the other guy, in working on your personal skill set every day when you’d rather just take the money and be good enough. It happens in picking up your teammates and helping them be better too.
You don’t prepare for playoffs games. You prepare for playoffs moments. You keep preparing for them, repeating that resolve, precision, and dedication over and over again until you don’t even have to think about it anymore, until it comes as instinctively as breathing. You prepare until you don’t get caught in isolation sets with the clock running down and two defenders on you anymore. You prepare until you’re not thinking about whether to shoot or pass because the decision was clear to you the whole time the play was developing. You prepare until you don’t have to think about bodying that guy away from the rebound because you’re already there and he has to think about bodying you. You prepare until you don’t have to worry about dancing around that 7’4 shot-blocker because he’s got your knee in his chest already and you just dunked it over his head. You prepare until nothing anybody else is going to do will knock you off your game because your…game…is…un…knock…able.
The minute, the second, you’re thinking about anything else in practice, in games, in warm-ups, or in your personal drill sessions, you’ve already lost. Every moment of imprecision and indecision opens the door for a team to do that to you again.
How much do you like the feeling of being patted on the back and told you did pretty good…for you? Does the “feel good” from that assurance counterbalance the bad feeling of watching those other guys laugh their way off the floor after playing you? If you don’t hate that bad feeling more than you like the consolation, this team is never going to be good in any absolute, measurable way.
So decide what kind of farewell you want to this season. Let that decision shape what happens for you in the offseason and what happens the next time we lay eyes on each other next fall, preparing for the next one. You can either justify this experience or you can change this experience. There is no middle ground.
Decide what you want. Because in basketball, as in life, it’s generally true that what you want is exactly what you’re going to get. You don’t have to tell me what you decide, nor your teammates, nor the fans. Everybody is going to see it by how you work, how you practice, and how we play.
