Washington Post reporter and Blazer’s Edge reporter emeritus Ben Golliver dropped by the We Like the Blazers podcast with me and Conor to rap about his approach to reporting and (of course) his take on the current state of the Portland Trail Blazers.

His assessment was frank:

It’s in a frustrating spot. There’s not really any way around it. I could mince words and be polite, but they’re lost. They’re adrift. They’re out to sea... that seems like it’s been a real issue just for this entire group over these last couple of years is the inconsistency and effort level and the togetherness has just not really been there. And you know, throughout Blazers history, that’s typically something you could count on, right? And so that’s why it feels a little bit adrift to me. Now you have a new front office. You’ve kind of got a new relatively new business side group there. And then you’ve got this ownership where I just have no clue what’s going on, there’s just this is a gigantic ownership vacuum. And so you throw all those things together and it puts the players in a tough spot. Like they’re almost have to be like self-motivated, self-driven.

Golliver was also confused - as many of us were, this author included - on why the Blazers stood pat at the deadline:

I think that you’re learning from this deadline that no one’s really coveting the Blazers players, right? That’s kind of the with the takeaway, because they so obviously should have made the move for the future that the fact that they didn’t says that nobody gave them good offers, and that’s a tough spot to be in. I mean at the very least you feel like you can, you know, sell off a player like Robert Williams, right? Like, what’s going on? What use is he to the Blazers? I don’t get that. Again, these are not going to be huge home run deals, but you’re stuck in the worst part, you know, because they used to call the treadmill of mediocrity where you’re just like, “oh, we’re losing in the first round. We’re losing the first round.” But you’re not even doing that. You’re not bad enough to get the number one pick, right? But you’re not good enough to even compete for a play-in spot, which, you know, it’s a pretty low bar, especially when you’ve got Phoenix playing like they are and when out for the season. So, you’re just in absolute no man’s land.

To kick off the episode, Ben chatted about how he got his start in sports reporting, and how it wasn’t a career that came to him straight out of high school:

It’s amazing how long it took me to realize that I love basketball and I loved writing, and that I should maybe consider writing about basketball. It was like into my mid-20s before I managed to do two plus two equals four on a career front. So, um I do not want to come across like, oh yeah, it all made sense. It all worked out. You know, writing at Blazer’s Edge was amazing. It was the best possible way to learn how to cover a sport. You know, a lot of times writers will go to J school and they will start you know, high school prep sports, you know, on a local paper and try to work their way up from there. For me, it just wasn’t my passion, anything besides the NBA. And so, I needed to kind of jump in the deep end.

He also talked about his approach to reporting during his time at Blazer’s Edge, and using the community as a calibrator of whether his work was hitting on something people felt strongly about:

I think a lot of times maybe [I was] writing some stuff that other people wish they could have written because they don’t they maybe they had editors who are trying to pull them back or maybe they’ve got word counts or maybe they’ve got structure limits that we just did not have because it was, you know, a competitive advantage at Blazer’s Edge to just have almost total freedom to write what you want to write. And then you got to listen to the reader feedback. I mean, I go back to that all the time. It’s one of the reasons why I so love reading Dave’s stuff and the community that he’s cultivated. because they will kind of steer you in the right direction, right? And sometimes you’ll know you’re on to the right direction because everybody’s mad. And then it’s like, okay, all right, this is stuff that people don’t want to hear. It’s a hard truth.

We really appreciated the conversation, and Ben’s graciousness toward us, toward Managing Editor Dave Deckard who he credited multiple times for shaping his path, and for all of us here on site for being “one of the few places that would still want” longer, more in-depth pieces.

You can find Ben’s work at the Washington Post, and you can listen to him twice a week on the Greatest of All Talk podcast with Andrew Sharp.