The Portland Trail Blazers are in danger of letting their season get away from them. One year removed from a conference finals appearance, they're 9-15 entering play on Tuesday and outside the playoff picture. They're losing guys like flies to injury. Jusuf Nurkic has still not appeared in a game. Zach Collins is out until early March, at best, with his surgically repaired shoulder. Rodney Hood is out for the season with a ruptured Achilles.

Portland brought in Carmelo Anthony and he's definitely done his part, but it hasn't made a ton of difference. The Blazers are just 4-6 since Anthony arrived and two of those wins were against the Bulls. The Blazers are a bottom-third defensive team, and even though their offensive rating is decent at No. 12 league-wide, they're just so dependent on Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum to produce just about everything.

They definitely need another scorer, specifically a shooter, and as such, The Ringer's Kevin O'Connor is reporting that the Blazers are expected to pursue a trade for Oklahoma City's Danilo Gallinari.

Gallinari makes sense from a lot of standpoints for Portland. He's a 40-percent 3-point shooter on almost seven attempts a game, and the Blazers are just 16th in the league in 3-point makes. He would space the floor for Lillard and McCollum. He can create offense on his own. He has switchable size defensively.

Gallinari is also on an expiring contract, meaning he wouldn't tie up Portland's books beyond this season unless they chose to re-sign him. By contrast, Kevin Love -- who recently said that if he ends up being traded from the Cavs, he prefers the Blazers -- is in the first year of a four-year, $120 million deal, so the Blazers would be tied to him for big money through the 2022-23 season.

Gallinari would definitely help Portland -- significantly, in fact. I'm not sure casual fans realize how good he is. But does he make the Blazers a true contender to win the West? Probably not. So they have to ask themselves how much they're willing to give up for a guy who doesn't push their ceiling that much higher who can just walk away from them this summer. Because there will certainly be other teams competing for Gallinari. That combination of production and expiring deal appeals to just about every contender.