Heading into the 2021-22 offseason, Portland Trail Blazers star guard Damian Lillard was transparent in noting that the Blazers as currently constructed weren’t good enough to compete for a championship. Under that ultimatum, Blazers general manager Neil Olshey went out and made modest-but-not-groundbreaking additions to Portland’s roster. In assessing the league in his first Power Rankings following the free agency frenzy, Colin Ward-Henninger of CBS Sports viewed Portland as the team that took the steepest decline improvement-wise.
Ward-Henninger opened his article by praising the ambition of teams such as the Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers, before acknowledging the Blazers’ failures in appeasing Lillard’s “highly-publicized pleas for help.