not so weird in the context of their historic offensive rating and 4th easiest schedule. That offsets the defense a bit, at least it does in the regular season what is a bit weird is their record compared to their net rating Portland has overachieved their expected wins (PW) by 6. Their rating says their record should be 22-24. Pretty clearly this is due to their record in close games. And the reason for that is having the best clutch player in the league this season on their side.
These defensive stats should be put on Dame’s MVP resume. The stats show exactly how amazing he has been this season. With this defense, Portland should be closer to .500 or below, not 28-18.
IMO the style of defense Stotts coaches doesn't work as the game changes like you said. Until Stotts realizes that nothing much will change outside of players stepping up on their own.
It's so bizarre that a team that shoots a ton of threes seems to not understand that the league has changed and adjusted their defense. Like..... have you watched your own offense???
This combined with how traps work against Dame but we rarely trap or pressure or show aggression on defense. Or how the defensive philosophy of dropping the big is to force mid range shots yet on offense we usually have players who shoot a ton of mid range shots (Aldridge, Melo, CJ). It's like an NFL team playing prevent defense as their base strategy. It can work occasionally but over the course of the season it will get torched.
Think part of the reason is that he thinks the personnel does not have the capability to do it, and to an extent he is right. I remember they were very aggressive at the beginning of the season with the trapping and teams just ended up shooting a million open corner 3s and Stotts abandoned it. But it's kind of a chicken and egg situation. Part of the reason our players are bad at it is because they have never practiced this type of defense for any prolonged period, so of course the growing pains are going to look terrible. The other part is Stotts is kind of correct, expecting Kanter and Melo to go up and trap and recover is probably not very realistic. But I think there's a balance to it as well. He can try doing it more when the secondary player on the trap is a guy with length like RoCo or DJJ, or do it when we have RoCo playing center (which we often do now). My issue with Stotts defensively, beyond just playing Kanter and Melo too many minutes, is that we play the same defense on almost every possession. Very rarely do we adjust or show teams different looks, and when we do, it's usually a 2-3 or 3-2 zone where half our players are confused whether we're in zone or we're in man. Some of that is on the players for sure, but after 9 years of this I think some of the blame has to go on Terry.
We have the 5th best offensiv rating in nba history We have the 2nd worst defensive rating in NBA history
We are the Chip Kelley Ducks. Try to torch someone on offense while playing a bend-don't-break defense. It works until someone figures out how to stop you offensively and then you just get run off the court.
... or you run into an offense that's even close to as good as yours but is paired with a good defense.
that was infuriating. Nurk and Roco going all out to be aggressive is the only reason we won that game. Contrary to what some people think here, deciding to trap aggressively IS indeed a schematic choice by Terry, and one he doesn't implement nearly as often as he should.
Honest question. Since Stotts gets BLAME for our defense.......does he get CREDIT for our offense. Is there a really bad offensive team, but good on D that would like to be in our position? Curious if there a bad offensive/good defensive team out there with a record as good as ours?
I know you're around the team all of the time but still are you really a proponent of us being the only team in the history of the league to keep a coach for an entire decade without a ring if we don't win one this season? Are you even cool with the fact that this season we are making league history by keeping a coach for a ninth season who hasn't won a game past the second round?
For me, I believe the offense would similar no matter who the coach is. It doesn't take some sort of offensive mind to run PnR with Dame and ISO CJ and Melo with very little movement or passing.
I actually think a lot of coaches could get more out of this offense. More points in transition, more points off of both ball and player movement and still get a ton of points off of the PnR and iso situations both of which would have more options attached to them if they were accompanied by some player movement away from the primary action.
In this Tweet I linked two articles in which talk about our crappy defense 5 YEARS AGO. I could've changed a few names and info to make it sound like it was from today and would anyone have noticed? He had one of the best trapping bigs (Plumlee) in the league, defensive wings in Aminu/Harkless/Turner (all but Turner were players from the team the previous year), and a full training camp and ample practice time to implement a more aggressive defense but this guy Stotts actually chose to stick with his conservative defense. It's all just excuses and I'm sick of it. Stotts just HOPES it will magically get better. The fact that Nurk is begging to play aggressive, just like Plumlee did, and the coach says that's not what he's telling him to do is beyond comprehension. He just doesn't get how to teach defense and the game has passed him by.
