In the last few weeks i have changed my perspective on things. I'm no longer sticking to my past beliefs about this team. I am now looking at every month as a new month with improved players who grew from the month before. What did we expect? that a new team will show us their final form in November? So Aminu made his mistakes on drives to the basket and improved, he is now looking to pass when he dribbles in there. CJ looked soft as hell in November but now he's in his player's jersey for the most part and even Dame is trusting his teammates more instead of launching hopeless 30footers. These guys deserve to be in the playoffs now, judge them based on the current form of the team. And no, i'm not changing my opinion on this if the Blazers have a negative win-loss record in February.
I can see that many of the individual players are improving. I can see that the team is player better collectively (as a unit). The team is playoff relevant, and it's fun to actually check the standings and see how other teams around us are doing. The team has a fun style of play. Things can go wrong during a game and we can still win (Lillard didn't hit an outside shot in the whole game against Milwaukee, and we still won). The team plays hard. However, things aren't perfect: We could easily go on another 5 game losing streak. Vonleh is improved a lot, but we still haven't seen his 3 point shot, or his post game. He's invisible out there sometimes. He hasn't reached the comfort level I would like him to have yet. Biebs - when he's on, we're a much better team. I will concede that he's an intelligent player overall, but his indecision leads to cringingly poor decisions, which drive me (and others) nuts. He's a bit slow-footed, but he has learned to go "straight-up", so he's definitely improved. Plums is a great passer in the high post, but he'd be better if he actually looked at the basket in that position. All of the players have things to work on (our guards could become better defenders, for example). We still have a poor record against +.500 teams. We're still in our infancy. A 9-16 road record is fine for a borderline playoff team, but not for a bona fide playoff team. We still don't have a big that Stotts is comfortable putting in the post. I am very comfortable with our "Big 2" + awesome role players. However, I'd like a "Big 3" - NO has work to do, and I don't mean for another "good" player", we need one more amazing player.
January feels a whole lot like a mirage when I see who we've been beating. Only the OKC game stands out as impressive, so I'm not sure how instructive it is to look at this team on a month by month basis, when there's so much variance in terms of home and away splits, quality of opponent, etc. I see the next two months being brutal. If they win 10+ games I'll be impressed.
So, what you're saying is that you don't believe the Blazers will win 10 games over the next two months?
I think the Blazers will probably win about 6-7 games more than I predicted. Which is probably close to within one standard deviation. is that really worth being impressed by? They still don't defend very well, their ceiling still doesn't look high enough to be anything other than a "nice" team that reliably competes for an 8th or 7th seed every year. The only thing that could have impressed me this year is seeing Damian turn into a lockdown defender, or Meyers becoming a rugged interior player, or Vonleh taking huge strides and morphing into a 15/10 guy. a few more wins here or there in a rebuilding season aren't that important to me in the grand scheme of things.
If you just forget the win loss record the thing to be impressed about is how quickly they are putting it together and how much improvement they've shown..I never expected playoff by any stretch this season but these guys apparently didn't get that memo...and man it's been fun watching them go after it.
I ran out of milk today so I ate my cereal with half n half and water mixed together. Not the same but not bad, kinda like this season.
I haven't watched a lot of college basketball, but it seems as though there are always 3-5 guys every year that turn into a really good/great player. Making the playoffs and losing a draft pick in rebuilding year guarantees no shot at such a player. Off-hand I think Ben Simmons, Skal Labissiere, Dragan Bender all have a shot at being special.
Yeah I agree with Aminu. He's been making better decisions. He was shooting lights out at the start of the season but that was just a small sample size fluke. He's still been hitting enough threes to keep defenses honest and with his skills on the other end of the court that makes him a hell of a player. I think at the start of the year we were catching opponents by surprise, they thought we could be a 19 win team and didn't prep seriously. We also had young guys who were in mid season form from months of working out while veteran opposing teams were playing into shape. Some of those early season road trips were brutal though and the losses really piled up. Lillard seeing the team win when he sat out was great for everyone. Gave teammates confidence and Lillard the realization he can just fit in instead of always trying to take over. I think this team has actually played relatively even throughout the year more than is the norm for most teams. Most of the win/loss discrepancies have been from the schedule. But I do agree there are some nice small improvements that have been made. Very encouraging year so far. I predicted 32 wins but said at the time I wouldn't be shocked if we got 10 more or 10 less. CJ has been the biggest positive from the season. Stotts coaching has been excellent as well.
Where I work my night shifts, they watch a ton of college ball so for the first time in years I've seen quite a few complete games...what looks like a star in college is probably going to look a lot different in the NBA....Nolan Smith looked great in college...Adam Morrison looked great in college....my advice..don't hold your breath about a needle mover in this draft
