After being one of the most pleasant surprises in the league last season, the Phoenix Suns made a couple of tweaks to their roster (like trading for Miles Bridges), but maintained the status quo for the most part (like re-signing Jordan Goodwin and Collin Gillespie).

As a result, the Suns expectations were largely the same — a play-in team, who may be able to compete for a top-six seed if everything breaks right.

That made their opening night matchup against the Portland Trail Blazers (a team with similar expectations around them) the perfect test to start the season. Unfortunately, for the Suns, the Blazers took this comparison to heart, and made sure that everyone knows that there are levels to this stuff.

The Trail Blazers made history beating the heck out of the Suns

From the moment the game started, it looked like the Blazers were firing on all cylinders, and that the Suns woke up on the wrong side of the bed. The Blazers scored the first 21 points of the game. In fact, the Suns found themselves in the foul bonus before they even scored a single point.

It took seven and a half minutes of game action for the Suns to register their first field goal of the 2026-27 regular season. By the end of the first quarter, the game was pretty much out of reach -- with the Blazers holding a commanding 43-12 lead.

The Blazers' home broadcast mentioned that the 33-point lead the team carried with them at halftime was the largest they've ever held through two quarters on a opening night in franchise history. The final score was 124-83, with the Blazers winning by 41.

According to the good folks at StatMuse, that was the seventh-largest margin of victory for an opening night game. Ironically enough, the record for this category was also set by the Blazers while they were playing the Suns. To begin the 2017-18 season, Damian Lillard and the boys stomped the Suns by 48 points! Poor old Devin Booker was also a starter for the Suns in that game. Maybe it's time to request a trade?

Worst opening night losses in NBA history

For as good as the Blazers were, this wasn't even the biggest blow out of the night. The new-look Toronto Raptors beat the Chicago Bulls by 43 points, with Kawhi Leonard, Scottie Barnes, and Immanuel Quickley all contributing 23 points each.

Obviously, if you are the Blazers, you are feeling pretty good about life right now. I still want to see them play a more formidable foe before I start making some bold proclamations about their team.

However, this was an absolute worst case-scenario situation for the Suns. Last season, they found success by killing people on the offensive glass, forcing a bunch of turnovers, and taking a ton of threes. The Blazers nabbed three more offensive rebounds, took 15 more threes, and the only reason they didn't win the turnover battle is because they had eight in the fourth quarter (when the game was already decided).

Losing Grayson Allen and Royce O'Neale and replacing them with Bridges and a healthy Jalen Green seems to have changed the team's identity in the worst way possible. Khaman Malauch, who had a great offseason, started in place of the injured Mark Williams and didn't look all that sharp.

Hopefully, this was just a really, really off night for the Suns, and they will return to their old, scrappy selves when they play the Golden State Warriors on Saturday. If that's not the case, and this is just who they are now, it's going to be a long season for the team that plays in the desert.