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PORTLAND, Ore. — Nobody wants to revisit just how brutal last season was for the Trail Blazers. The 55 losses. The blowouts. The revolving roster. But today, Chauncey Billups and the Trail Blazers are here to remind you of the treasure found at the bottom of that shipwreck of a season.

“I look at it as, man, we lost a lot of basketball games to get Shaedon Sharpe; let’s play this kid,” Billups said. “Let me see what he’s got.”

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What Billups and the Trail Blazers have in Sharpe is one of the most entertaining, athletic players who have ever come through Portland, and one who has all the markings of stardom.

If you think that is hyperbole, you didn’t see Sharpe’s first career start on Friday against Houston. The 19-year-old guard had 14 points in 29 minutes, which included three thunderous dunks — two on back-to-back plays that even had Blazers’ chair Jody Allen and vice chair Bert Kolde up out of their courtside seats in amazement.

“He’s just must-see TV,” Billups said. “You never know what he is going to do when he has that runway like that. He made a couple plays that obviously had that crowd going, but I thought he was solid overall.”

When told that Allen and Kolde, who are normally reserved, were out of their seats, Billups smiled.

“I think everybody was. I was so hyped, I felt like a player at that moment,” Billups said. “I wanted to go out there and bump chests with him.”

There was a lot to like on Friday for the Blazers during their 125-111 win. Center Jusuf Nurkić (27 points, 15 rebounds, three blocks) was dominant. Anfernee Simons (30 points) hit seven 3-pointers. Justise Winslow (seven points, seven assists, six rebounds, three steals) was everywhere. Nassir Little had some pretty passes. And they did it all while their star, Damian Lillard, missed his first game with a strained right calf.

But the night belonged to Sharpe, the seventh pick in the June draft. He wasn’t perfect — Billups noted he missed a defensive assignment that led to an offensive rebound, and he made some silly fouls — but he hit 7-of-12 shots and had the building buzzing any time he was on the court.

The signature moments came early in the second quarter, first when he cut into the lane, received a pass from Jerami Grant, and tomahawked a rim-rattling dunk. It was a cut that Grant has been instructing Sharpe to look for when he has the ball on the block.

☁️ UP & UP ☁️#RipCity | @ShaedonSharpe pic.twitter.com/nsRLDJ3Jf8

— Portland Trail Blazers (@trailblazers) October 29, 2022

“The thing about him is he is listening and picking things up,” Grant said. “And the way he jumps? It is unique. It’s going to wake everybody up.”

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If his soaring dunk through the lane didn’t wake everyone up, the next play did.

Houston had trouble getting the ball past midcourt, and when Blazers’ guard Keon Johnson chased down the ball near Houston’s basket, he spun in the air and lofted an alley oop toward the basket, where a trailing Sharpe caught the ball then collapsed the rim with a dunk. On the Blazers’ bench, there was pandemonium, including center Drew Eubanks, who feigned a heart attack.

ABSOLUTELY SPEECHLESS #RipCity | @GEICO pic.twitter.com/lzRTsB23Nn

— Portland Trail Blazers (@trailblazers) October 29, 2022

“This is year five for me, and I haven’t seen anybody like him where he jumps and just floats,” Eubanks said. “It looks like he jumps and has time to think about what he does, or how he is going to dunk it. This guy is super talented, he’s young, he gets it, he wants it … he’s the full package.”

And that right there — the talent, the want, the full package — is what really matters about Friday. Sure, the dunks are fun and memorable, but big picture, what does this mean? Is what Sharpe is doing enough to take the Blazers from a promising team to a problematic opponent? The Blazers are 5-1, and the scary part is, they might be getting better, and more dangerous, as Sharpe becomes more acclimated to the NBA game.

“I heard Dame say it earlier this year, he was saying like, Shaedon is the type of talent that could take us over the edge of being a fringe playoff team into a full-blown playoff team fighting for a championship,” Eubanks said. “When he said that, I was like, ‘Damn, I’m gonna kind of take that with a grain of salt.’ Because I hadn’t seen Shaedon play … but after watching him play these first six games, and in preseason, I’m like, he’s super talented. He has the world at his fingertips. I believe what Dame said now, for sure.”

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Lillard wasn’t the only one who saw it early. Billups did, too. Saw it in the first week of training camp.

Billups said his view of Sharpe began to change very early in training camp when the 6-foot-6 guard had “two incredible blocks against the starters,” followed by a step-back jumper that forced overtime in a scrimmage.

“I was like, ‘this dude is a little different,'” Billups remembers thinking.

Then, the week between the end of preseason and the start of the regular season, Sharpe’s talent became too great for Billups to ignore. The Blazers scrimmaged nearly every day for a week.

“And he was one of the best guys in the scrimmage every day,” Billups said.

Billups felt himself leaning toward putting Sharpe in the opening night rotation, but before he committed to it, he leaned on his relationship with general manager Joe Cronin.

“I talked to Joe about it early on and Joe said, ‘Chaunce, it’s completely up to you. If you want to redshirt him all year, or if you want to develop him, I’m good with that. But it’s up to you,'” Billups said. “But I know what my eyes have seen, and I know that kid has a chance to be very special. And what better way to develop him that to just throw him into the fire.”

Sharpe played 16 minutes on opening night, finishing with 12 points on 4-of-6 shooting, including 3-of-3 on 3-pointers. Entering Friday, he was averaging 16.4 minutes a game and was sixth in the league among rookies with an average of 8.4 points.

The biggest gap in Sharpe’s game is on defense. Billups said he is solid on the ball in keeping his man in front of him, but he either strays in his assignment when his man doesn’t have the ball, or he is late in rotations.

“He was picking up things so quickly in training camp but he was really kind of far behind defensively off the ball,” Billups said. “On the ball, I was impressed with him. He stayed in front of the ball very nicely, blocked shots, his length and athleticism … so it was more about are we going to be able to live with a lot of his inexperience off the ball? Then you look at it and, shoot, we’ve got guys who have played a long time in the league and are making the same mistakes. So why charge him for that?”

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Sharpe, it was decided, was not only going to play, he was going to be an every game rotation player. Now, the question is how big of an impact is he going to make. To hear his teammates talk, the surface is just being scratched.

Simons is an NBA Slam Dunk champion, and for the past four years has held the distinction as the team’s best leaper.

“Not anymore,” Simons said Friday night.

Simons was among those still buzzing about Sharpe’s back-to-back dunks — the one through the lane off the pass from Grant, and the alley-oop from Johnson.

Why do Sharpe’s dunks elicit that kind of reaction from elite jumpers like Simons?

“It’s different. It really is different,”‘ Simons said of Sharpe’s lift. “That dunk he did (off a pass from Grant) he took one step outside the lane and got up like … that … that was … I don’t get impressed by too many people, but that was crazy. That dunk alone was impressive to me, but I couldn’t even do that. Not at all. Nuh uh. I need time to get up like that.”

It’s not just the dunking that has teammates talking about Sharpe. Winslow says he and Sharpe usually arrive early and shoot together before practices and shootaround.

“I think what I’ve noticed is, it’s just easy for him. He makes everything look easy,” Winslow said. “He just has that God-given talent that you can’t teach, and it makes it look so nonchalant. But it’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s more that the game comes to him so easy because he is so super-skilled.”

We talked about what this super-skilled youngster could do to change the trajectory of the season. Already, Billups has added an element to the team’s practices to cater to Sharpe’s unique leaping ability. Billups has the team practice throwing lob passes. As the Rockets can attest to on Friday, having a high-flying dunker can change the vibe in the arena and put one’s head on a swivel for the rest of the game.

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“I think as we get into the season, we are going to need his scoring ability and just his aura out there on the court,” Winslow said.

As his teammates were answering questions about Sharpe throughout the locker room, the 19-year-old came out of the showers and noticed people were gravitating toward his locker. Bashfully, he pleaded with Rahsaan Gethers, the Blazers’ vice president of communications, to get out of interviews. Gethers assured him it would be painless, and that he would do well.

“Why don’t they interview Greg (Brown III)?” Sharpe asked. “He did the East Bay (dunk).”

The media horde shifted to the locker next to Sharpe to interview Simons, and Sharpe looked at me and asked “So, what kind of questions are you going to ask?”

It was so innocent, so endearing, so void of ego. All for a kid who has already has one finger wrapped around this fan base.

“He’s a connector,” Billups said. “People love him. They love being in his presence. He’s got a great way about him.”

When he finally was the one surrounded by microphones and television cameras, Sharpe did well.

“At the beginning I was anxious, a little nervous,” Sharpe said. “But once the tip ball happened, I just started relaxing and played the game I know how to play, within the team and everything. It’s surreal, cool.”

That pretty much sums up how this tortured fan base has felt in these opening weeks of the season. It’s been a surreal start, helped by a cool rookie who continues to open eyes and make his appearances must-see TV.

What’s next? You have to watch.

“The sky is not the limit,” Winslow said. “Because he can jump out of it.”

(Photo: Alika Jenner / Getty Images)

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