Amen Thompson’s new deal with the Houston Rockets is the latest reminder of just how much the Portland Trail Blazers missed when they took Scoot Henderson at No. 3 in the 2023 draft.
Thompson, who went one spot later to Houston, agreed to a five-year, $208 million extension that includes a 10 percent trade kicker, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported Thursday. It’s a huge number by any standard, but it also came in below the max. As NBA salary cap analyst Yossi Gozlan noted on X, it represents a “significant paradigm shift for a player of his caliber to get a rookie extension below the max.”
Gozlan laid out the math behind it: a five-year max would have reached $250 million at 25 percent of the cap, while Thompson’s extension lands at 22 percent of Houston’s cap. In other words, Thompson could have pushed for the full max and still settled on a deal that keeps him just shy of that top tier financially.
For Portland, that only sharpens the sting of the pick. The Blazers passed on Thompson for Henderson, and the early returns couldn’t have looked more different. Henderson’s rookie year was historically rough, while Thompson quickly looked like the superior bet.
To Henderson’s credit, he has bounced back from that brutal first season and has settled into a role-player lane in Portland’s backcourt. And to be fair to the Blazers, the pre-draft consensus had Henderson in that second tier alongside Brandon Miller, with most observers expecting teams to take whoever remained after Charlotte picked at No. 2.
But Thompson’s extension makes the missed opportunity feel even bigger. What Portland passed on wasn’t just another prospect - it was the kind of talent that can reshape a franchise.
General manager Joe Cronin has at least helped soften the blow by finding other young pieces through trades, landing Deni Avdija and Toumani Camara. Still, it’s hard not to wonder what this roster would look like if Thompson were in the mix instead of Henderson.
With Thompson in Portland, the team likely would be sitting in that next tier of Western Conference contenders, alongside the Minnesota Timberwolves and Denver Nuggets. The spacing would still be tricky, but the defensive upside would be enormous, enough to make the Blazers arguably the best defensive team in the league.
Portland also took a step away from that defensive identity this offseason with its surprising trade for Ja Morant, a move that likely never would have happened if the Blazers had drafted Amen Thompson instead of Scoot Henderson.
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The intrigue is whether Morant ends up as the Blazers main ball handler and clear-cut star, especially with Damian Lillard and Deni Avdija also in the conversation for scoring leadership. Sam Quinn raised the bigger concern around whether Morant can make that kind of money make sense if he is not consistently putting pressure on the rim as the guy running the offense, which is exactly the sort of question Portland cannot really avoid. [Read more 🡒]