The Portland Trail Blazers are in the NBA version of limbo: not contending, not stockpiling young stars, and not in possession of a clear road map for the future. Ideally franchises either want to be chasing a ring or growing talent to someday do same. Portland...isn’t.
That probably explains why the Blazers rank 28th out of 30 NBA teams in ESPN’s annual Future Power Rankings [subscription required]. The chart measures where a team is, how much future cap space and how many future draft picks they hold, what market they play in, and how adept their management team appears to be in putting all of these things together into a winning recipe.