Quick: without Googling, can you name the last time the Portland Trail Blazers signed a free agent that immediately catapulted them into title contention?
If you’ve been at this long enough, maybe your mind went to Rod Strickland, an on-the-rise, 25-year-old point guard in 1992. Or, maybe you thought adding Wesley Matthews or Andre Miller to those young 50-win Blazers teams was enough to throw them over the top.
Regardless, here’s the underlying point: with five decades of a sample size, we can be almost sure that no superstar free agents are signing the dotted line to come play in Portland’s small market.