After spending the first four seasons of his NBA career with the Washington Wizards, Deni Avdija was traded to the Portland Trail Blazers this past season.
Avdija was coming off a career year where he averaged 14.7 points, 1.2 three-pointers, 7.2 rebounds, and 3.8 assists in 75 games for Washington. Nonetheless, the hapless Wizards, who drafted the 6’9 forward with the 9th overall pick in the 2020 NBA Draft, decided that they needed another reset last summer.
After initially struggling over his first few weeks with the Blazers, Avdija has improved by leaps and bounds as the season has gone on. His scoring average improved in each of the first four months of the campaign, ascending from 10.0 in October to 18.3 in January. Though his numbers dipped slightly in February, he responded with his best month of the season yet this March.
In his games for Portland in March, the 24-year-old put up 23.4 points, 9.8 rebounds, and 5.2 assists. He has scored at least 30 points in five games already since March 3. Portland came into this season with no aspirations of making the postseason, but Avdija’s play has pushed this team back within striking distance of the play-in tournament.
Avdija has been influential in each of the Blazers’ wins and contributed a season-high 36 points in best performance of the month, a quality 128-109 win over the Denver Nuggets. He also had four three-pointers and impacted the game well beyond scoring, adding eight rebounds, seven assists, three steals, and a block to finish with a game-high +/- of +27.
What’s even more encouraging is that most of Avdija’s points came within the flow of the team’s offense and he scored them in a variety of ways–from jumpers to nifty moves in the post to strong drives to the basket.
All-around performances such as these have become the norm for Avdija and it looks like he has carved out a place in this franchise’s future alongside Toumani Camara, Donovan Clingan, Shaedon Sharpe, and Scoot Henderson. Avdija is exactly the type of multi-faceted forward that the league highly covets these days, and Washington’s mistake of letting him go is Portland’s massive gain.
The Blazers’ future remains highly uncertain at this point, but with Avdija forming part of their core, they have, at the very least, a formidable foundation for whatever kind of team that they want to build.
