Portland's playoff journey throws them against the West's elite. Can they overcome top contenders after a potential Spurs upset?
The Portland Trail Blazers have secured the No. 7 seed in the Western Conference and will officially begin their playoff run this weekend. While Portland is expected to be a fairly significant underdog just to make it out of the first round against the San Antonio Spurs, it’s the playoffs, and nothing is guaranteed.
Have the Spurs been the second-best team in the NBA and, at certain points this season, arguably the best team in the entire league? Absolutely.
But anytime a team’s core pieces are young and relatively inexperienced in the postseason, there’s room for error. That’s not to say the Blazers are loaded with seasoned playoff veterans either, but they do have some experience, and despite being the less talented team that didn’t come close to matching San Antonio’s regular-season success, bigger underdogs than Portland have advanced in the playoffs before.
So naturally, it’s worth taking a look at what the Blazers’ path would be if they were able to get past the Spurs in the first round. Simply put, it wouldn’t get any easier.
If Portland were to pull off the upset, it would then face the winner of the Minnesota Timberwolves-Denver Nuggets series. Both teams would present major problems. Denver won a title just a few years ago and still has Nikola Jokic, who many would argue is the best player in the world. So if the Nuggets were to advance, the Blazers would go from facing Victor Wembanyama in the first round to Jokic in the second in that scenario.
If Minnesota advances instead, that challenge looks a little different, but not any less daunting. The Timberwolves have reached back-to-back Western Conference Finals and have already proven they’re built for playoff basketball. They’ve been one of the more battle-tested teams in the conference and have consistently shown they can handle the physicality, pressure, and adjustments that come with a postseason series.
Then, if the Blazers were somehow able to get past one of those two teams and reach the Western Conference Finals, the most likely opponent would be the Oklahoma City Thunder. If not Oklahoma City, the other possibilities would be a Houston Rockets team that has caught lightning in a bottle or a Los Angeles Lakers team that, if they had made it that far, would likely have Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves healthy and rolling.
So when it comes to difficult playoff paths in the Western Conference, it’s hard to draw up one tougher than the road Portland would have to take. The focus, of course, should remain on the first-round matchup against San Antonio.
But even if the Blazers were to pull off a massive upset in that series, it wouldn’t mean the road suddenly gets any easier. If anything, it would only reinforce how brutal the path ahead really is.