Awful Announcing updated their every-four-years fan vote for the best and worst local announcing teams in the NBA. The Portland Trail Blazers’ team of Kevin Calabro and Lamar Hurd ranked just above average, in twelfth place. The team ranked fourth in 2020. As a fan vote, relevant or large-market teams often receive far more attention, both positive and negative. The Trail Blazers have been essentially invisible on the national scene over the past three years. So it’s hard to tell if any trends truly matter.
The highest ranked teams are the New York duo, with Mike Breen, Walt Frazier and the Knicks at #1, and Ian Eagle’s crew in Brooklyn at #2. Joel Meyers, Antonio Daniels, and the Pelicans ranked third.
At the other end of the scale, The Washington Wizards’ Chris Miller and Drew Gooden ranked 28th, while Philadelphia’s Kate Scott and former Blazer Alaa Abdelnaby ranked 29th. To nobody’s surprise, the Golden State Warriors’ Bob Fitzgerald and Kelenna Azubuike ranked dead last.
The Trail Blazers posted a “Best of Kevin Calabro highlight reel on YouTube three years ago.
Let’s get more granular here. I believe my claim was that the Blazers were among the most directionless teams in the league. I’ll stand by that, as they simply don’t have the tools and resources to make big leaps forward right now. Between that and owning one of the lowest records, it’s not pleasant.
Portland can’t repeat what they’ve already done and there’s no clear way forward to fix it in the immediate future. They don’t have a winning culture/tradition or a strongly-embedded infrastructure to fall back on in the meantime. They’re stuck in a swamp, with no choice but to slog it out and hope they end up somewhere better soon. That’s not only among the problematic places to be in the league, it could be argued they’re in one of their worst places ever as a franchise.
If we look at things objectively, though, there are teams in similar or worse circumstances right now. The Blazers are in a disadvantaged position, not a hopeless one.
Offhand, we can measure a team’s prospects by four categories:
