You can never say anything with absolute certainty. But my opinion is that Nurkic isn't (and never was) the caliber of talent that could have turned that series.
The thing that everyone is going to say is the biggest positive is totally conjecture... and I share their opinion. I think Billups is going to make us better but he's still dealing with the same shit. Our bench has more well rounded player who are average bench players in the league. It got even smaller as amazing as that might seem. We lost/got rid of some guys who were starting level specialists but had the biggest holes in their game making them unplayable. Honestly, I just don't know. If Chauncey is great and both Ant and Nas pop then yeah we got better. If Chauncey when everything is averaged out, is only as good as Stotts and Ant and Nas are the same... we got worse. So most likely we got very very marginally better... about as close to a push as you can get. Not better than we were finishing out the season though. That marginal improvement is over what we were in the Nuggets series because everyone is going to know to take advantage of our lack of size. The funniest thing about the roster construction and I'm sure we tried to get a guy like Portis but our two actual bigs don't lend themselves to small ball on defense at all. The teams we've seen successful with lineups close to as small as ours had 1-5 who could fly around the court and be disruptive. Actually... the funniest thing is if we go into another season thinking the Dame/CJ back court will come close to equaling the some of its parts.
i dunno for sure who this guy is, but he appears to be a Philly media person. He's followed on Twitter by Morey.
I think the last line, especially considering all of the Dame bullshit this summer, should have added "at the earliest". If I'm supposed to take this dude seriously. If we're not open to trading him now, I don't think we have any intention of having to trade him. It doesn't mean we won't it just means that's not the plan.
Yeah the last sentence is dis-ingenuous. But from a Philly perspective, it's hearing what you want to hear.
You realize we had a healthy Nurk in the series against New Orleans? We got schooled with a healthy roster.
Apples and Oranges. Nurk was a better player than that year. He showed big progression in 2018-19 season.
Portland's record, in the playoffs, with a healthy Dame-CJ-Nurkic, is 3-12, and two of those wins came against Denver when Dame was averaging 34 & 10 while posting a PER of 30, a TS% of .660 and a BPM of +12.2. I get you want to believe beast-mode Nurkic will be next season's Nurkic, but beast mode never stretched past 8-10 games. There was always regression. Just like CJ regressed last season after his hot 12 game start. Just like Dame regressed from that 10 game stretch when he was averaging 44 & 10 on historic efficiency. Players simply aren't as good as their best stretches of basketball I guess you could argue that Portland was a contender in 2019 by virtue of making the final 4. But a contender doesn't get swept, while Portland did. Right now, comparing the 18-19 roster and the current one, that earlier team was better
there’s no one left that’s worth it. For example, I’d rather see Nas play than old ass Millsap. Safe guess is they’ll make a 2-1 trade involving Jones, maybe even CJ.