Putting the 'Trail' back in 'Trailblazers'

Portland is 2-8 over their last 10. What's wrong?

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

Changing Pastures, Rosa Bonheur, 1863

The Portland Trailblazers had lost seven of nine games heading into Tuesday’s game against the Magic. If you squint, you can understand it a little bit: all seven losses had come on the road, where Portland has spent more time than all but one of the 30 NBA teams. The wins came at home. While you hate losing that much when the margins are so tight in the crowded Western Conference, the relief was on the way: 10 of 11 games at home leading up to the start of February. All that road pain should dissipate with some sweet home cooking.

And then the Blazers went and lost their return home against a bottom five team on the second game of a road back-to-back.

SportsCenter @SportsCenter

This ending to Magic-Blazers 😳

The loss plus Utah’s improbable win dropped Portland into No. 11 in the West by percentage points, outside of the play-in. Brutal.

Portland had begun the season 10-4 before the wheels came off a bit (that included starting 6-2 on the road). They are 9-17 overall since. Coming into the season you’d have expected the Blazers to have a strong offense and a work-in-progress defense. If Portland was going to matter in the West, you’d figure that the offense would have to be quite good to counter the fact that a backcourt involving a 32-year-old Damian Lillard and Anfernee Simons was going to have trouble at the point-of-attack with all the illustrious scoring guards, especially in the West.

As it turns out, the offense is merely average, which undercuts the reality that the defense has been better than expected (it’s also average). Chauncey Billups has found a scheme that fits the personnel to some degree. Even over this bad stretch, Portland isn’t losing because it can’t get stops: the Blazers are No. 5 on defense over the last 10 games. The Blazers simply aren’t good enough on offense for a team starring one of the most dynamic backcourts in basketball.

Lillard, who missed most of last season with injuries that may have been stretched once Portland began tanking, has slipped on offense somewhat. He’s still a top-10 guard in the NBA. But I’m not sure the performance indicates he’s an All-NBA guard at this point. (You get six guards on All-NBA. I have Luka, Donovan Mitchell, Ja, Shai, Harden, Curry and Jaylen Brown above him. Devin Booker would be there but he’s missed a lot of time. I’d listen to the 2022-23 Trae vs. Dame argument. Darius Garland.)

Simons, whose 2021-22 breakout created so much hope here, is actually performing about as well as he did last season on a per-minute basis. That’s a win given that the Blazers are more competitive and he’s sharing the load with both Lillard and Jerami Grant. But the 23-year-old hasn’t taken another leap, which would help counter Lillard’s age-related dip.

I think Portland’s offensive disappointments come down to two issues: Lillard and Simons aren’t shooting quite well enough to justify how often they shoot from deep (a combined 21 attempts per game on 36.7%) and those two plus Jusuf Nurkic are turning the ball over way too much given relatively meager assist totals. To wit, Portland ranks No. 12 in effective field goal percentage — they should be top-10 with Nurk, Grant and Josh Hart shooting at high conversion rates, but Simons and Lillard are lagging a bit and take the lion’s share of shots — and ranks No. 28 in turnover rate. This is exacerbated by the reality that the Blazers create a below-average number of turnovers — they are losing the transition game most nights, which puts more pressure on the shotmakers and the defense.

This is all to say that Portland can certainly snap out of it. The defense not being a disaster is a big win for the front office and Billups’ staff. If Lillard and Simons’ shotmaking perks up and those two and Nurk can take better care of the ball, the Blazers could very well reverse this tide and get back into the 4-5-6 portion of the Western Conference race instead of the 10-11-12 portion where they sit now. But it’s not a given, and the fact that this is a struggle at the midway point raises intrigue for the future of the roster. The Blazers didn’t go out and make these moves to sneak into the play-in.

The time is now for the Blazers to take advantage of the schedule like they didn’t do on Tuesday against Orlando. If they can’t do that, they don’t belong in the playoff race.

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Heat Culture

So, the Thunder’s first national TV game this season was eventful!

Miami was down to nine players entering Tuesday’s game against the Thunder, one above the bare minimum to compete. Dewayne Dedmon had a dispute with Erik Spoelstra staff after getting yanked early in the second quarter. As he walked away, he slapped a massage gun off a table … and it landed on the court during live play.