No one expected this start. Of course it's great, and fun, but is it real? Is this wining percentage sustainable? Personally, I think it's not. Of course I hope I'm wrong, but this is not the best team in the west.
I don't know if 71% .712 winning percentage is sustainable but I do think this is a pretty big sample size against some of the best teams in the league. We have another tough stretch coming with Utah, Milwaukee, Cleveland but I think we'll win at least two out of those three and that's what I think we can sustain. I think we will keep winning two out of every three games if we stay healthy and keep getting better at the same rate as the rest of the league. Just growing together as a team like every roster does throughout the season. So .6666 or 66.6% which will get us to around 54 wins. It's crazy because I had us at 46 wins and battling to stay out of the play ins but now I think we'll be battling for seeding and most likely having HCA in the first round at least.
I expected it. Check the prediction thread. And I dropped money on the team in Vegas. We were getting Dame back with a much better supporting cast than the WCF team. It was obvious.
Many many moons ago, a coach named Maurice Cheeks looked at me and said, “Big John, it’s a LOOOONNG season.”
We just need to take it one game at a time and worry about our own journey. Right now we’re up 1 game on the Suns and Nuggets, 1.5 games ahead of the Grizzlies/Pels and 2 games ahead of the Grizzlies. We’ve already won the season series vs the Suns and beaten the Pels and Nuggets once. Grizzlies have already lost to the Jazz twice, while two of our games vs the Jazz aren’t until January and March when they could already be tanking. Let’s make it through November first, then we can assess the standings. As long as we make it through this tough stretch, we’ll be fine. We aren’t even fully healthy yet, and abunch of other teams have yet to go through a tough stretch of games.
I think most of us have some built-in skepticism for the Blazers; it seems impossible to follow this team for decades and NOT grow a bit jaded after all the heartbreak and disappointment we've had to endure as fans. What I'd ask is for a more critical analysis. IF this year's team's isn't actually as good as their current record, which aspect of their start isn't sustainable? Is it just the "winning close games" thing? What encourages me more than anything else is that they have a lot of things that haven't actually gone their way so far. Ant's percentages have dipped. Hart isn't shooting particularly well. Several players (including Dame) have missed multiple games--some haven't even played at all. Turnovers! ('nuff said). I honestly feel like there are more things to point out that can reasonably be expected to improve than there are things that we should expect to drop off. So all that to say...yes, I do feel like this is real and sustainable, and I haven't felt like this about the Blazers in a long, long time.
Our point differential +2.3 projects to 47-35 so I’d say our win/loss record is not real. On the flip side, we can expect improvement from Ant & Shaedon, both Dame and Nurk are playing sub par, our team is still getting used to each other, and adding GP2 should be huge. On the flip flip side, Grant can’t sustain 50% from 3 and Dane can’t sustain his all time high free throw rate. So somewhere around 50 wins seems right.
