It's hard to look at the in-out play this year without remembering that Oden and Pryzbilla - which scored most of their points close by - are out. But, last year, we took 66% jump shots, only 3% more than LAL which won it all - and you have to remember how much better GO looked on offense earlier this year. This team, quite frankly, is not a contender. To be a contender you need to be efficient offensively, defensively and set the pace. Before GO went down - the Blazers seemed on pace on all 3 accounts. Now, we have 2 out of 3. That makes it a good team, a playoffs team, but not a contender.
To be completely fair, before Oden went down this team looked like a discombobulated mess -- part of that can be attributed to an adjustment period between Oden, Brandon and LMA, but early returns weren't all that positive for Brandon and LMA
I check that page before each predictions game, to help estimate the score. (Note: It doesn't seem to help.) About 3 weeks ago my free URL from last year stopped working, so they must have changed it. Thanks for the new one. The best I have is that Hoopstats lets you disaggregate efficiency numbers in many ways. Against playoff teams, we get more free throws and assists than the opponent. We shoot our free throws better. Despite the slow play, our turnovers are only 10% better. http://www.hoopsstats.com/basketbal...-trail-blazers/team/playerstats/10/25/9-3-eff (see bottom 2 lines)
Despite the discombobulated mess, the Blazers were still 10th in offensive efficiency at the start of the year... I think that if this is the definition of a mess, given also a brand new PG, for all intents and purposes a new SF and the loss of Batum - we were in a good spot...
I'm not talking about the team's stats; they 'looked' like a mess, were not playing particularly inspired basketball, and were clearly out of sync. That top ten ranking was compiled against some pretty mediocre competition.
Yes, they looked rather uninspiring - but they were playing fantastic defense and the struggles still did not look too bad given all the changes. There are going to be adjustment issues every time you make the kind of big changes that happened at the start of this year, especially for a team where the core guys are as young as they are. No way around it. I have no doubts that just like Roy and Miller seem to coexist much better now - the same would have happened with GO. Might have taken a bit longer - but there is just no way it would not work. These guys have too much talent and are too smart (specifically - Roy, GO, LMA) to not make it work.
