Have we been looking coy this year playing against teams playing WITHOUT their best or one of their better players? I know we didn’t handle our business at home earlier in the season in this situation. A friend of mine with the league sent me this today and was wondering what you guys thought. Key players who have missed games vs. Portland this season: Blake Griffin Stephen Curry Draymond Green John Wall (2x) Kawhi Leonard (2x) James Harden Jimmy Butler Tony Parker (twice) Mike Conley Hassan Whiteside Paul Millsap Eric Bledsoe Myles Turner (2x) Serge Ibaka Rudy Gay
Its not the Blazers fault those players were injured and not able to play. They just had\have to take advantage of that. Blazers still lost some of those games. I believe the Blazers can still beat a lot of those teams even with those guys playing.
I'd like to see that same list for all other Western Conference playoff teams, or at least the ones closest to us in the standings. It's not like Kawhi (and Conley, Millsap, Wall, Parker, etc.) have only missed games against us. Hell, Kawhii has only played in 9 games all season. And, don't forget, other teams (SAS and OKC) have gotten to play against us without Dame as well. It works both ways. BNM
Since we've lost to bad teams and have a propensity to get trapped, I don't think our record has benefitted.
I've wondered the same thing for a while. It seems the past few years, star players have a high frequency of being out injured or rested against us. It's almost a sign of disrespect, like the league is saying we're not good enough to worry about, but just good enough to make them put in more effort than they want to. And they can grant us some cheap wins that'll give us a worse draft pick and still go nowhere in the playoffs. But, without following other teams' day-to-day scheduling, maybe that's the perception of many fan bases?
He's trying to act like we didn't break him this summer but he can't move past it. Now he babbles about the same stuff and is even quoting Jason Quick! And now rooks are invading! We broke him!!!
I'm not going to go back and check the history, but wasn't @HCP one of those who agreed with Curry when asked about the ease of the 2015 championship run? You know when the Warriors played every injured team? HCP was one of those who said. 'You can only play whos in front of you'. Now HCP starts a thread like this? Guess we all have an agenda. HCP's is to convert every Blazer fan to a Laker fan.
