Somebody in Portland's backcourt is coming off the bench, and it should be Ja Morant. Micah Nori hasn't made that call yet. He's said he'll spend the whole preseason tinkering before deciding whether it's Morant or Damian Lillard running the second unit. Fine. But once he settles it, the right answer is the player the Blazers just traded for.
Start with the part nobody should argue about. Nori has said plainly that starting Morant and Lillard together doesn't work, and he's right. Two undersized guards who've never been stoppers can't anchor the same backcourt, not with Jrue Holiday sitting right there, a bigger body and a far better defender. Start Holiday. The real question is which All-Star swallows the bench role.
And it has to be Morant, because Lillard has earned a benefit of the doubt Morant hasn't. Lillard is the franchise's own, back home and coming off a torn Achilles at 36, on a team-friendly deal he took specifically to play in Portland again. You don't shove that man to the bench in what might be his last act as a Blazer. It'd be a basketball mistake and a PR mess rolled into one.
Morant is 27, the more expensive piece in this backcourt, and the one who's spent the last few years giving the league every reason to withhold patience, with the suspensions and the missed games piling up. A player with that recent run doesn't walk into a new building under a first-year staff and assume a starting job. He earns it on the floor. That's the deal.
The pushback I hear is that the math runs the other way: Lillard's the one with the Achilles and the mileage, so he's the one whose body belongs in a managed, off-the-bench role. Lillard's legs are the real question mark this season, no argument there. But the homecoming is bigger than any one lineup card this team fills out this year, and Morant's game actually translates better to a bench role. A downhill, explosive scorer leading a second unit against backups is a nightmare matchup. That's a role built for him.
As for the hand-wringing about mixed signals out of Portland: a coach saying out loud he hasn't decided, and that he'll use four preseason games to sort it out, means the staff is refusing to pretend an awkward fit is a clean one. Give Nori credit for naming the problem instead of starting both guards and hoping the defense sorts itself out in November.
Portland opens the season at home against Phoenix on October 21. By then the call needs to be made, and it isn't hard. Dame starts. Morant proves he belongs. In that order.
