Evanson: Is Portland losing interest in the Blazers? And how much does Jody Allen care?

With the NBA Draft just more than a week away and the Trail Blazers desperately in need of a key piece to what they hope will be a successful rebuilding puzzle, I can’t help but ponder one very important question: Who cares?

I’m serious. Without a face of the franchise in the wake of Damian Lillard’s departure, just two months removed from what amounted to the second worst season in franchise history, and as interest in the team in and around the city is waning by the day, I wonder if those who used to live and die by the team are in fact, dead?

I’m speaking figuratively of course, but while fans — or potentially former fans — of the team may still be walking upright, it sure seems like their days are numbered as the team they grew up loving or grew to love fades further into irrelevancy.

Ask around and you won’t find that same fervor that used to define Rip City.

No longer are topics involving the Blazers at the forefront of conversations at your local bar or water cooler.

And questions surrounding the team are less about those, but rather who is on it?

Instead, it’s the sweet—or not so sweet—sound of silence that should ring loudly in the ears of one Jody Allen.

The sister of former owner Paul Allen who became the de facto owner of the team upon Mr. Allen’s death nearly six years ago, has done little to ingratiate herself to fans of the team and seemingly even less as proof of any semblance of interest in improving the product on the court.

She took the easy way out when faced with a decision on a new General Manager, hiring long-time front office employee Joe Cronin; has been strangely silent regarding head coach Chauncey Billups despite the third-year head coach winning at an abysmal .329 clip; and happily moved on from Lillard in the fall of 2023 as a means of “turning the page.”

But while an eye on the future is never a bad thing, doing so without a plan for it is at best complacent, and at worst a complete waste of time—neither of which should or does give me or fans of the team confidence in what’s to come.

Next week, what’s to come is an important personnel decision via the draft, or a trade leading up to or as part of it. Normally, that would create a buzz amongst the team’s biggest supporters, but instead, little is being said about potential rookie prospects and what those prospects could mean for the Blazers going forward.

Maybe that’s due to it being an exceptionally subpar draft?

Or possibly as the result of a diminished college game that is producing fewer known commodities by the year?

But it also might be the product of a franchise losing a foothold on the people it seems are being taken for granted?

This market has long been one of the gold standards of the NBA. For half of a century, Portland has lived and died with the Blazers, and through good and bad they’ve supported the team. And in return, the team has taken their wants and needs seriously. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, and as a result, those same fans who bought tickets, watched on television, and/or followed “their” Blazers closely through the media are doing less of all the aforementioned, which has resulted in a level of indifference that is getting harder to ignore.

So, the question remains: who cares?

The answer is me, and I suspect most of you, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t bother reading it. But maybe the better question is for how long? Because it’s getting more expensive to go to games, harder to watch them on television, and more painful to buy the product that the franchise is selling.

I wonder how much Jody Allen cares about that?