Deni Avdija may not be the loudest name swirling around the Portland Trail Blazers this summer, but he might be the one who matters most.
Portland’s offseason has been packed with bigger, flashier talking points. Damian Lillard’s return.
Ja Morant’s arrival. Micah Nori’s contract situation.
Scoot Henderson’s lack of an extension. Shaedon Sharpe’s knee injury.
Even the contentious negotiations between Tom Dundon and Portland city councilors have taken up plenty of air. That kind of chaos naturally pushes other storylines to the margins, and Avdija has been one of them.
That feels off. After the best regular season in five years, the Blazers head into 2026-27 with a roster full of questions, but Avdija is not really one of them.
He just turned in a career year, made his first All-Star appearance and put up 24.2 points, 6.9 rebounds and 6.7 assists per game. The easy assumption is that a step back is coming.
That’s usually how these leaps work. The buzz around Lillard and Morant only makes that expectation louder.
But Portland may want to think bigger than simply asking Avdija to hold steady. The smarter move could be making him the center of everything.
At 25, he is the safest long-term bet on the roster. He is not injury-prone.
He is not 36 years old. He is not undersized for his role.
And unlike some of the other names in the mix, he is not a player the Blazers are waiting on to become something else. He already is something.
His 24/6/6 line last season made him one of only three players in the league to post those averages, alongside Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic.
That’s the kind of company that tells you what he’s becoming. Avdija isn’t the star Portland may have imagined after Lillard’s departure, but he might be the better fit: a long, versatile forward who can run offense and locate teammates once defenses collapse around him. His production has climbed year by year over six seasons, and the next jump may depend on whether the Blazers fully lean into what he does best.
The numbers back that up. Avdija’s usage rate jumped to 30.9 percent last season, the highest among all forwards. Even with that workload, his assisted rate percentage on all shot attempts sat at 49 percent, first among forwards with at least 1,000 minutes, ahead of LeBron James, Paolo Banchero, Jimmy Butler and Jalen Johnson, according to Cleaning The Glass.
That tells you he can create for himself. Less than half of his made shots were assisted, and that has improved every year since his rookie season. But the more interesting part of his game is what happens when he’s making decisions for everyone else.
His assist percentage reached a career-high 31.5 percent last season, a jump of more than 12 points from the year before and good for the 96th percentile among forwards. Cleaning The Glass also tracks assist-to-usage ratio, which gets closer to showing how pass-first a player really is. Avdija landed in the 94th percentile among forwards there, too.
That’s rare territory. Lillard has only once posted a better assist-to-usage ratio than Avdija, even though he has had eight seasons with more assists per game than Avdija managed last year.
LeBron James has nine seasons that matched or fell below Avdija’s recent ratio, per Cleaning The Glass. Avdija is not in LeBron’s class as a passer, of course, but the willingness to move the ball and keep the offense humming is very real.
There are still issues to iron out. His 3-point shooting dipped to 31.8 percent on six attempts per game last season, which is a problem after he hit 37.4 percent on 3.1 attempts in his final year in Washington and 36.5 percent on 4.8 attempts two seasons ago.
The decline appears tied to his heavy diet of above-the-break threes, where he made 108 of 346 attempts, or 31.2 percent, on 5.2 tries per game, according to HoopsJunkie. He also kept firing a little too quickly after offensive rebounds, connecting on 32.9 percent of those second-chance threes.
If he shifts more of those attempts to the corners and cuts back on the shot selection, and if Morant helps generate cleaner looks, the outside shot should rebound. That would also lift his true shooting percentage, which was 57.8 percent last season according to HoopsJunkie.
A more reliable deep ball would make Avdija even more dangerous. If Portland chooses to build around him, he has a real chance to move from All-Star to something bigger, and maybe become one of the league’s fixtures for the next decade.
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Ja Morants Grizzlies Exit Still Feels Hard To Explain
Ja Morants move out of Memphis and into Portland was already one of the more jarring transactions of the offseason, and the reaction around it has only added to the intrigue. The trade went down on June 29, sending Morant to the Trail Blazers for Jerami Grant, Kris Murray, and cash considerations, a deal that immediately felt bigger than the names involved because of what Morant has meant to the Grizzlies since entering the league.
A video of Morants first reaction to the news quickly surfaced on social media, and the surprise on his face helped explain why the departure still feels unusual. Since then, Morant has struck a more optimistic tone, talking about Portland as a fresh start and an opportunity to reset, but the emotional whiplash of the move is still part of the story as he begins a new chapter in the Northwest. [Read more 🡒]
Blazers Need One Big Answer From Vit Krejci This Camp
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Portlands interest is straightforward: Krej has size, can handle the ball a bit, and was brought in to help the perimeter game, but the shot has to come along for him to hold that role. He also has to prove he can stay on the floor after a calf injury interrupted his finish to last season, leaving the Blazers with one big question as camp opens: is this the version of Krej they can count on? [Read more 🡒]
Blazers Have An Early Name To Watch For A Thin Wing Spot
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Ariza brings the sort of defensive profile and three-point touch that can make a prospect stand out even before the rest of the offensive game catches up. For a Blazers roster that may be looking for help in the backup wing rotation down the road, he fits the broad outline of a developmental target worth tracking, even if there is still plenty of time for the picture to change. [Read more 🡒]