The Portland Trail Blazers finally have a young core worthy to build around but the distance between them and contention is still large. That’s the conclusion reached by Tim Bontemps and Kevin Pelton of ESPN as they detailed goals for all 30 NBA teams in the coming year. They analysts broke up the league into tiers ranking everywhere from “all-in on a championship” to “all-in on nothing”.

The Blazers ranked among five teams classified as “building around young cores”. Their companions were the Atlanta Hawks , Detroit Pistons , Memphis Grizzlies, and San Antonio Spurs . The explanation of Portland’s position:

The Trail Blazers now have a large collection of young talent — Deni Avdija, Shaedon Sharpe, Scoot Henderson, Donovan Clingan and Yang Hansen are all under 25 — that they’r

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