The 2013-14 Trail Blazers are one of my favorite teams of the millennium. Watching them almost inexplicably leap from 41-win also-ran in 2012-13 to 54-win-near-contender the next season was some great basketball and fun.
Weirdly, it seems largely forgotten how unexpected those 54 wins were for the Blazers. I vividly remembering a text conversation during the summer of 2013 that can be paraphrased like this:
Me: Man, this team is stuck on the treadmill. What the hell can they do to get better?
My brother: Oh, they’ll be fine!