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Portland is not currently pursuing free agent swingman DeMar DeRozan, league sources say, despite reports to the contrary.
London Lions will become the first British club in history to face an NBA team when they take on the Portland Trail Blazers in a preseason game at the Moda Center on Monday 12 October 2026. The fixture tips off at 1:00pm local time, which means a 9:00pm BST slot for supporters in the UK, giving the Lions a prime-time autumn stage for one of the biggest nights in the club’s history. It is the first time a club side from the United Kingdom has ever shared the floor with an NBA franchise, and it arrives at a moment when British basketball’s profile continues to rise both domestically and internationally.
The game also carries a strong Portland link for Lions head coach Tautvydas Sabonis. His father, Arvydas Sabonis, spent seven seasons with the Trail Blazers between 1995 and 2003 and remains one of the most beloved European players ever to wear a Blazers shirt.
Michael Scotto: The Portland Trail Blazers have hired James Brocato as Director of Basketball Innovation and Ameer Bahhur as Rip City Remix Head Coach for their G League affiliate, league sources told @hoopshype .
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NBABase: Bill Simmons: "One of the things I was fascinated by was, 'Why did they let this guy buy the team? Why let "El Cheapo" [Tom Dundon] get in there?' Apparently they only had two offers [for the Portland Trail Blazers sale] ... I just don't think they had a lot of people that wanted to buy in."
Where could the Blazers go if they decide to leave? If the NBA goes to Las Vegas or Seattle, it will be through expansion. The league is exploring that right now, and it wouldn’t pass up $6 billion-$10 billion in expansion fees. So where else could the Blazers go? Raleigh comes to mind. Dundon’s Hurricanes play there and their arena did just get renovated. Raleigh is roughly the same size media market as Portland, but the Hornets play 150 miles away. Austin — about 200 miles from Dallas, where Dundon lives — could make sense but the San Antonio Spurs are trying to expand their market to capture the city. Would the Memphis Grizzlies consent to Nashville accepting a new team?
Shams Charania: Free agent forward Jeremy Sochan has agreed to a one-year deal to sign with the Portland Trail Blazers, agent Deirunas Visockas of Gersh Sports tells ESPN. Sochan -- who has averaged 9.9 points, 5.4 rebounds and 2.5 assists entering his fifth NBA season -- finished 2025-26 on the championship Knicks.
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Iman Shumpert: ‘I’m so excited for him to start this journey in Portland. I want him to prove everybody wrong so bad. It make me so angry and it's in retrospect, but it's like, out of anybody that's need to have one, y'all don't think he would like, just the audacity of the state when people are like, what is he ever going for? I'm like, bro, they making $200 million a year. Like, in three years, they going to have $200 million. Like, you don't think he going to have a firearm to defend himself? I'm like, a security guard will rob him. It's all security. Like, what? Like, it's a lot of money, so it's perspective wise, I just, yeah, he did a dumb thing by going on the internet with it. But it's like, I just want him to be able to write the wrong, not even off the court, but on the court, to be healthy and doing the thing that it's like, this is what got him in this situation.’
Bill Oram: "Early on in Tom Dundon's tenure, the number of people who said to me, Portland has never seen anything like this guy. They are not at all prepared for the way that he is going to operate and the way he negotiates. And I think that has proven true at every step of the way. His mindset and his mentality when it comes to negotiating is so firm. I have been told a number of times he doesn't negotiate, he sets his terms and you either get there or you don't."
Bill Oram: "It has become clear what the challenges of operating a team in Portland actually are, given the economic realities and the direction of the market. It is not a city that is growing in terms of population, it is losing businesses. The economics of the team have been really bad. Ticket sales have been way down in past years. They were charging among the lowest prices of the 16 teams in the playoffs. It is a hard place to make money."
Chris Mannix: "It struck me when I've had some phone calls, mostly with league officials, just how much leverage Tom Dundon believes he has. The Blazers need or the city needs the Blazers more than he needs the city. It's struck me and a lot of league officials who are you know, I'm I'm speaking more to the league side that I am to anybody in Portland, just the exasperation on a league level with how this is going. And I think that was reflected in Adam Silver's comments in Vegas uh during Summer League where he just usually the cherry-eyed optimist about some of this stuff, Adam would usually say it's going to get done, we'll work it through some stuff. Like watching his kind of face kind of go blank and seeing him deadpan like you know, there's this is off track, I believe was his phrase was really revealing to me and and told me where the league thinks that that this situation is. And and Dundon clearly believes that he's got a lot of leverage here and he's going to get whatever deal he wants or else he's going to do what he wants or at least try to do what he wants."
