The Portland Trail Blazers have multiple missions during the 2025-26 NBA season: win games, incorporate new players, develop their young core, and overcome a spate of injuries that has dogged the team since November. Amid the ups and downs, one player has toiled relatively anonymously, give or take a spectacular dunk or two. Shaedon Sharpe has played in 36 of Portland’s 40 games while averaging a career-high 21.5 points, but nobody is talking about him. Until today, that is, when Sharpe becomes the focus of our Blazer’s Edge Mailbag.
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What’s your take on Shaedon Sharpe? My opinion keeps changing weekly. I love the things he does well. His dunks stir things I haven’t felt since I cheered for Clyde when I was in college. He always seems to do well enough. I guess that’s better than he was last year. But I don’t look at him like a star and I don’t know why. For a guy who can jump that high it seems like this is the quietest 20 point average I can remember. Have you got a read on who Sharpe is and whether he’s going to be a big contributor for the future? I just don’t know.
I don’t think it’s an accident that Sharpe slips through the cracks sometimes. He’s being eclipsed on the regular by Deni Avdija, who is the Golden Goose of the franchise right now. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
We’re used to putting the Blazers in three categories: role players, up-and-comers, and busts. Let’s add a fourth–“Star”– for Deni and then do a mental experiment. I’ll name a player, you describe them. I bet it’ll take you less than half a second to categorize each one. I can even predict with reasonable certainty which category you’ll pick. Watch.
- Deni Avdija–Star
- Toumani Camara–Role Player
- Scoot Henderson–Up-and-Comer or Bust
- Donovan Clingan–Up-and-Comer
- Matisse Thybulle–Role Player
I guess we could create a special category for Jrue Holiday and Jerami Grant, calling them “veterans”. That completely ignores that they’re radically different players playing different positions and are in different stages of their careers. But ignoring complexity and uncertainty is how we’ve learned to deal with the Portland Soup that’s been simmering for the last few seasons. We speed-sort indistinguishable murky messes into defined realities. The surprising thing isn’t that we do it–it’s a human tendency–but how fast we can do it with this otherwise quite variable roster.
But wait. Now do Shaedon Sharpe. You can’t, can you?
Is Shaedon a star? Not really. Not entirely anyway. He has moments, but he hasn’t dominated the way Avdija has. Is he a role player? No. Those 21.5 points would argue differently. They also prevent him from being a bust. But playing in his fourth season with significant, but incremental, improvement, he’s not a true up-and-comer anymore either.
Sharpe is in a no-man’s land when it comes to public perception. What you think of him probably depends on the predetermined spot you’re viewing from. If you want him to be a star, you’re mildly disappointed. If you view him as an up-and-comer, you’re probably at least slightly enthused about Shaedon this year. Either way, it’s as much about you as about him.
The fog around Shaedon may not be confined to fan perceptions either. Sharpe is a shooting guard. What, exactly, is a shooting guard supposed to do in today’s NBA?
You referenced Clyde Drexler in your question. If Sharpe played back in the 1990’s like Clyde, his mission would be clear: dominate the team’s scoring. If opponents sent a smaller guard onto him he would post up, get the defender on his back, then rise and turn for an unblockable jumper from 10-12 feet. If a larger guard lined up against him, Sharpe would take him off the dribble and try to drive, dunk, or get fouled. Either way, he’d have all the space, time, bounces, and touches he needed. His skills, role, and position would align and he’d have nearly-unlimited possessions to explore them.
Today’s pace is faster. Nobody gets 12 seconds of the clock to work with anymore. Nobody posts up and probes, not even centers. Except for a few super-dominant dinosaur stars, isolation ball is a thing of the past. Shoot it or move it is the order of the day.
Today’s shooting guards are more like second point guards. They’re meant to be facilitators, floor-spreaders. Half of them are 6’3 speedsters with sharpshooting credentials.
The skill set for this new breed of shooting guard is different.
- Read the court! Well, Shaedon hasn’t played organized ball that long and he’s really more of a self-starting scorer than a floor general.
- Pressure the defense with a quick drive! Sharpe is more deliberate, needing to set up the defender before going past him…if he can get past him at all, because his first two dribbles aren’t that intimidating.
- Spread the floor! Sharpe’s best season from the arc was 36%. That was his rookie year when he sat in the corner and waited for Damian Lillard to pass him the ball off of a bent and broken defense that couldn’t close to him. Sharpe hasn’t sniffed that percentage since. Not even close.
Honestly, Avdija is playing more of a backcourt role for the Blazers right now than Sharpe ever has, at least by the new definitions. I guess in a healthy lineup that would push Sharpe to small forward? But small forwards are often offensive role players who specialize in three-point shooting. Sharpe is neither. He doesn’t fit there either.
Can you see all the gray area Shaedon is working in? He’s become pretty good at the game he plays, which is sometimes (but not always) what the sport and his team demand.
This would work really well if Sharpe were a transcendent superstar, one of those guys who is so good that he forces the game to bend around him. We haven’t seen that yet.
It would also work well enough if Shaedon could shore up the parts of his game that fit with modern demands. His three-point percentage sits at 33%. His True Shooting Percentage is 54.0%, 172nd in the NBA, 70th among statistically-qualifying guards. His Usage Rate is high, his Assist Rate modest. All of this screams decent older-school guard. None of it indicates a modern star.
But just when you put the period at the end of that sentence, you also see that Sharpe’s per-minute and per-possession scoring have increased significantly this season. He’s gotten more shot attempts, but his overall percentages have either stayed constant or gone up. He’s getting to the rim more often and drawing more fouls too. In addition to those dominating dunks, he’s taken over games from time to time. Looking at all this, there’s more in the tank. We haven’t seen all of Shaedon Sharpe yet. Even if he doesn’t quite fit, he’s too good to ignore.
In the end, the picture resolves to be almost exactly what the original question described. In a certain view, around the right bend, Sharpe ends up being a star. He’s already got the scoring chops, even in this unclear, developmental state. If he ever started firing on all cylinders, he could score 25 without thinking. But he’s not there yet. Either he needs to grow in efficiency and court synergy or the team needs to find a way to feature him better. He’s not yet a smooth player or a smooth fit.
The problem is, there’s no guarantee that time will solve these issues. It’s possible that Sharpe is the player he is and the league demands what it demands. He’s never going to be bad, but he might fall more on the Anfernee Simons side of the effectiveness scale than the CJ McCollum side. Or maybe by Season 7 he has it all figured out. Who knows?
For now, it just seems like the team and Sharpe are a little bit out of sync. It’s almost like there are two Blazers games going on at any given time. There’s the Blazers when Avdija leads and other teammates play off of him and then there’s another Blazers game when Sharpe has the ball. Those two haven’t been reconciled yet, at least not completely.
The relatively unstructured play of the last few seasons allowed Sharpe to show his talent but didn’t give him a good environment in which to hone it. The current mile-a-minute, move-the-ball approach might be better defined and executed but still isn’t optimal for his game. Sharpe remains a really good chef’s knife in need of sharpening, more than useful to a home cook but not quite ready to go into Gordon Ramsay’s hands.
Compare him now to two years ago and you’ll see how far he’s come. Into what is he growing, though, individually and environmentally? That’s now the key question. It hasn’t been answered yet. For now, 21.5 points per game and the occasional highlight dunk will have to tide us over.
Sharpe isn’t done developing. Neither is the team around him. Maybe we’ll get a better answer to these questions over the next year or so. (Perhaps with a permanent, skilled, empowered coach to help resolve these issues and the picture.) For now, understand that a few things continue to conspire against Shaedon, that he continues to make progress as he overcomes them, and hope for the best.
Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to [email protected] and we’ll try to answer as many as possible. And don’t forget to help kids in need see the Blazers play this spring!
