The Portland Trail Blazers waived Jeremy Sochan on Saturday, two days before the regular season opens and two days before the October 19 roster deadline. He was on a non-guaranteed Exhibit 9 contract, so Portland owes him nothing. If he goes unclaimed, he becomes an unrestricted free agent on Monday.
That is a quick ending for a player who went ninth overall four years ago. Sochan is 23. He spent three and a half seasons in San Antonio and has averaged 9.9 points, 5.4 rebounds and 2.5 assists across 228 career games.
Then it came apart. The Spurs released him after last season’s trade deadline. The Knicks picked him up, gave him 6.9 minutes a night over 16 regular season games, and won the title in June with him on the roster. Portland handed him a camp deal in August and a real shot at the 15th spot.
The Preseason Case Was Actually Pretty Good
Sochan played all four of Portland’s preseason games, averaged 12.2 minutes, and shot 62.5 percent from the floor. He scored 10 points on 4-of-6 shooting against Golden State on October 7, then put up eight points and eight rebounds against the London Lions on October 12. He hit two more threes in the finale in San Francisco.
Shooting was always the hole. He is a 28.6 percent career three-point shooter, and four preseason games is a tiny sample. But he made shots in the games he got, which is more than you can say for most 15th men auditioning in October.
Portland now has 17 players under contract, 14 on standard deals and three on two-way contracts. The Blazers could have converted Sochan’s camp deal into a standard non-guaranteed contract, kept him as the 15th man, and still stayed under the luxury tax line. They chose the empty slot instead.
What It Means for Portland
This is a flexibility play, and it is a defensible one. An open roster spot in October turns into a trade sweetener in January, and Portland’s front office clearly wants room to maneuver once the season is underway. Nobody wins a title with their 15th man.
The cost is depth in a spot where Portland did not have much. The forward rotation behind starters Deni Avdija and Toumani Camara was already thin, and Sochan is a big, switchable defender who will guard whoever you point him at. That is exactly the body you want sitting on the bench when a wing rolls an ankle in November.
My read is that Sochan signs somewhere inside of two weeks. There are 29 other teams, plenty of them are short on forwards who can defend multiple positions, and a 23-year-old former top-10 pick on a minimum deal is close to free. Portland is betting it can find that same player again in December if it needs to. That bet usually works until the one time it does not.
What this really tells you is how little a lottery pedigree is worth now. Sochan was a top-10 selection in 2022, a starter on a playoff-track team, and a champion five months ago. On Saturday he was a line item a team decided it would rather not carry.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.