It’s going to be like this as long as Purgatory Neil is running things. It was like this last year and he made moves “around the margins.” Don’t expect anything different from him.
There seemed to be a ton more optimism around here 6 weeks ago. Curious if there is anyone out there who has had their mind changed and gone from thinking this would be noticably better before the season started and feels different now after the last 20 games. Nothing wrong with being willing to change your stance with more information.
Dames numbers are the worst in his career due to an early season slump and our offense hasn't fallen off? Impressive. Imagine if he was his normal self all year.
I think fans are tired of simply making the playoffs and losing in the first round. I want to shoot for the stars and there seems to be only one why to try that.
Depends mostly on Dame. If Dame had played at his normal level we’d be 12-8 or 13-7 by now, on pace for 48 to 53 wins. If Dame plays the rest of the year like the first 20 games then yeah we’re in deep trouble, struggling to be a 0.500 team.
IMHO, that is actually bad news. It will artificially inflate our record which will give Olshit an excuse to do nothing. He can then blame the late season collapse on Billups. And for the record, this is not what I expected before the season. I really thought the team would improve as the season went on. That is no longer the hope, as too many of our players are unwilling or unable to embrace change. The situation with Dame has made it even worse.
Absolutely. Who could have predicted Dame would be this mediocre? He was supposed to be our one constant.
Our 5 starters have missed 3 games combined out of a possible 100 starts. Even with Dame's injury, that's way healthier than a lot of the teams we've played against. We beat Denver without Jokic, Porter or Murray. We beat Philly without Embiid. We beat Chicago without Vucevic. We beat the 1-11 Rockets. We beat the Lakers without LeBron or AD (for all but 7 minutes). We beat very mediocre Raptors, Grizzlies and Pacers teams, all on our home court. We beat the Clippers without Kawaii. Really, the only win we can be truly proud of is the second game of the season where we took it to a healthy Suns and won by 30+ points at home. Well, the Chicago one was pretty good too, but again another home game. Sure, if Dame were 100% we may have 3 or 4 more wins. But you could just as easily say if Jokic, Embiid, Vucekvic, Kawaii, AD and LeBron were healthy we could have at least 4 more losses, and be 6-14. It feels like a treadmill team right now. At best.
Do you also think Dame's injury is the reason we've continued to be a poor defensive team? How much better do you expect our defensive ranking to be by seasons end?
On the brighter side, the past 6 games Dame’s offensive efficiency has approached normal for him. Still down but almost. But he also had two really high FTA games in that stretch which might not be repeatable. Also those 6 games are kind of cherry picked. All in all I’m optimistic that Dame will return to form or close to form for the rest of the season. But I do have some fear that this could be in part the beginning of a steep decline. Dame does operate on thin margins which make his game a bit fragile compared to someone like Chris Paul who gains an advantage in more fundamentally sound ways that are less susceptible to Father Time.
Hahaha.... Depends on how much of it is a simple scheme fix vs our roster. If it's the roster, how much roster flexibility do we have in terms of players who have desirable contracts.
Blazers offense is almost as good as the Warriors. Blazers defense is 12 points per 100 worse than the Warriors. If we could just defend like the Warriors we'd be them. LOL. How is the Warriors defense so much better? Not much any of these: - We defend shots at the rim almost as well. - We defend mid-range shots almost as well. - We defensive rebound a bit better than them. - We foul less than they do. It's really just three things: 1. Warriors defend the 3 point line way better (39% vs 32%) = 7 points per game. 2. Warriors force more turnovers 16.4 vs 14.0 = 2 points per game. 3. Blazers allow more shots at the rim - 32% vs 21% = 3 points per game. So the problem is exactly what we already knew and really not much of anything else. We get beat off the dribble resulting in more shots at the rim and scrambling to help resulting in more open three's. Can anything be done? Is it really just personnel or do they do something different??? Defense is so underrated.
being 4th in offensive rating and 28th in defensive rating according to Casey Holdahl puts us at 16th in the league for net rating.....that's a 500 team and until they show they can close games and create runs, get stops....that won't be changing soon. I'm firmly in the camp that a coaching change wasn't solving our problem but I do think Chauncey will grow into a great coach...he's just figuring it out and we get to watch him do that.
I take all those offensive and defensive ratings with a massive grain of salt. If we hadn't faced so many injured teams, we could look a lot worse ratings-wise. Especially defensive ratings. The sad thing is if all the guys I listed above were healthy when we faced their teams, we could've been blown out several times. In which case our defensive ratings might be just as bad as last year in spite of no longer having Melo and Kanter. Yeesh.
generically, that's probably true if you go by winshares: Dame had 10.4 winshares in 67 games last season. So he'd currently have about 3 winshares in the 19 games he's played so far, assuming last season's rate. But he does have 1.6 winshares already so him playing normal would only add 1.4 wins, according to winshares obviously wins and winshares aren't exactly the same, but that's why I said 'generic'. Because when you look at the individual games, Portland has been so bad on the road, I only see one game, at Cleveland, where normal Dame might have made the difference. I think only the Sacramento (opener) and Cleveland games could be put in the 'probably-win-if-Dame-is-normal' category. Of course, 49 wins is better than 41