when was that? Rolo was a Blazer for 2 seasons and according to bbref, Portland ranked 16th and 10th in defensive rating but the Blazers were solid defensively at 4 starting positions. Dame was the only weak spot. Now it's both guards as weak spots
Honestly it wouldn't shock me if any of Lakers, Clippers, Blazers, Nuggets, Jazz get the #1 seed or fall out of HCA. Lakers might be favorites but teams usually have a letdown after winning the title, not to mention the short offseason, and have to work in some major new role players. Clippers had terrible chemistry and rest Kawhi so again a bit of a wild card with downside. Harrel was really a key on that bench in the regular season who is now gone. But when clicking they were awesome at times last year which seems to now be overlooked. Blazers have some new changes which might take longer then expected to get the offense and defense improved. But if it works right they are deep which could give them the best regular season west record even if a few other teams have superior 8 men lineups in the postseason. Nuggets are still young and could see Jokic, Murry slightly improve, and a huge improvement from Porter. On the downside they might miss Grant and Plumlee more than expected, plus Millsap could decline being 35. Jazz should have Bogdanovic back, added Favors to give them a great 48 minute center rotation, and Mitchell really took a postseason leap. If Mitchell can do that over the regular season they have enough role players and defense to be a somewhat boring but effective #1 seed. Dallas might have the best regular season player next year but starting without Porzingis and losing Curry I don't think they can get to #1.
Who was irritated? It just seems like at least a legitimate query comparing being top 4 in a conference to being a legitimate contender. That 8 teams were listed as 'contender' status also seems out of the norm as I can't remember a season where there have been more than 5-6 in a long time. Thought Schuhmann made very good points, both pro and con.
Just giving you guys a little static. Sometimes it cracks me up how quickly guys respond to things like that. Kind of feels like people are incensed. “How dare they say something positive about the Blazers? We’re not perfect yet.”
Some very good things were done this off-season. If they can combine the influx of talen with a healthy season, this team should be massively improved.....as it seems they should be. Their defense should be better although they did lose probably their best defender from last season in Ariza. DJJ and Covington will help a lot but those two combined are historically not good 3-point shooters which may offset some of the impact of the D. Hood being back as close to healthy as possible will also be a big help. Rebounding should be better, but will it be enough better from the very poor level they were at last year? ...and then there is still the lack of a playmaker outside of Dame once the traps come. That hasn't been addressed at all. So I do expect them to be better....but that 'better' is better than a team who needed Dame to go on a historic tear just to be the #8 seed in a play in game against Memphis who was missing one of their best players. They should be up to 4-6 just with health. Then how much of an impact the additions make will determine how much higher they get and if they can become the true contender we all hope they can.
Harden not a pg Magic was not the best player Curry yes without KD Zeke.......yes So a few seasons with both surrounded by hall of famers
So the first thing to address is that RoCo is a huge upgrade over Ariza. He's a much better defender and their career three point percentage is virtually identical... last season Ariza feasted on open looks that Dame got him and RoCo had to play on the Houston Clusterfucks. You left out a healthy Nurk which was the biggest difference between going from a 3 seed to barely making the 8th seed. Then you kind of mentioned the depth but that was incredibly understated. Lets say Jones starts like I think he will (I also think he'll shoot the three well) that leaves us with Gary, Hood, Zach (when healthy), Melo and Kanter... that's a ton of legit rotation players. You are right that we have to solve the Dame trap problem but all that has to happen is that CJ or Nurk... whichever Dame passes out to, have to drill making quick decisive moves to score if they are open or if they are covered finding the open guy. That's all there is to it. Obviously CJ can't camp at half court as Dame's outlet and that means Dame needs to also drill getting the ball out of that trap to an effective position on the floor. I really think we'll have that solved on December 22. We will have Jones and RoCo to trap Dame in practice starting next week... I have faith in our guys to finally fix this.
Wait, wait, wait... Magic wasn't the Lakers best player?!? In what universe was Kareem still better than Magic in 85', 87' and 88'. Magic wasn't only the best player on the Lakers in 87' he was the NBA MVP. Oh and until last season when he split possessions with Westbrook, Harden has been bringing the ball up and running the point for the Rockets for years now. Oh and if you want to argue that Jordan did the same thing, you'll only be shooting yourself in the foot because for all intents and purposes Jordan played point for the majority of his career too.
Nurk and CJ are playmakers. When we had Plumlee, his playmaking was very helpful (see 2015 vs Clippers) so hopefully, we go to Nurkic more this year.
Don't forget we had Lamarcus who played the softest defense, never boxed out, and was fed most of his rebounds by perfect Rolo box outs.
Aldridge was a pretty good man defender, and he rotated fairly well because of his mobility where Aldridge looked bad, and so did Rolo or any other Blazer big, was in that passive hybrid ICE P-n-R defense Stotts favored at the time. That had all the bigs hedging heavily toward the basket at every pick and screen. That left the Blazer guards, and often Batum, on islands trying to defend the ball-handler and the screener. Stotts even defended his defense by talking about how they were trying to bait teams into taking mid-range shots, which were supposed to be the least efficient. But that defense gave shooters space in the shorter mid-range areas, and those shots were higher efficiency. Worse is that defense started off by conceding initiative to the opposing offense. It allowed the opponents momentum at the beginning of possessions, and left the Blazer defense reacting instead of attacking Stotts apparently love passive defense. His teams don't attack ball movement and they don't attack passing lanes. Here's where his 8 Blazer teams have ranked in forcing turnovers: 2012-13 - 28th 2013-14 - 30th 2014-15 - 30th 2015-16 - 25th 2016-17 - 26th 2017-18 - 29th 2018-19 - 29th 2019-20 - 27th that's passive defense. and it's a big reason why I'm worried that Stotts will not be able to take full advantage of the defensive strengths of Covington and Jones. Those are the kind of defenders that can attack an offense. But if they are coached to wait for the offense to make a mistake instead of attacking it, their skills won't be maximized
I just looked at some of the NBA guys in LeBron's recruiting class Luol Deng Kendrick Perkins Charlie Villanueva Brandon Bass Travis Outlaw Kris Humphries Von Wafer Ronnie Brewer Aaron Brooks Its seems so long ago that any of these guys contributed in the NBA. Its really amazing how long of a career LeBron has had, I don't know we'll ever see anything like it again. Kareem was probably the longest playing star player ever, averaging 17/6 in his 18th season and lasted for two more years declining to 14ppg then 10ppg. Now if you look at the 2003 rookie class there are even more guys long out of the league; Kirk Hinrich Chris Kaman Nick Collison Luke Ridnour David West Sasha Pavlovic Boris Diaw Brian Cook Leandro Barbosa Josh Howard Luke Walton Steve Blake Matt Bonner James Jones Mo Williams
I really hope the media counts us out early....makes me know the NBA is still the NBA....what I really want is for us to buy more refs damnit!
The West isn't gonna be easy but I'm feeling good about our chances if (tfu tfu tfu hamsa hamsa) we stay healthy
Haha. I read through the team names like five times before I realized we weren't on the list... Send this to Dame, please.
That statistical model they're using... whatever the algorithm is seems fucked up. They have NOLA making a ten win jump after losing Jrue... you don't lose Jrue, replace him with Bledsoe and win ten more games by expecting that much growth out of Zion and Ingram... I just don't know how the RPM numbers would come up with that. They do point out that everything is really close. They do have the second seed Clippers only 3.5 games ahead of us... which is another anomaly I can't respect. Teams will fall short of RPM expectations because of non statistical factors. Coaching, cohesiveness of rotations and other non-numerical factors are very important. The talent and numbers might be this close in the West this season but the records just won't be. Teams will separate themselves. There is no chance that the Lakers will only be a 44 win team, when they won 52 last season in one less game... that's also a very unrealistic swing. I will say this, if we miss the playoffs or just make it and take another first round exit Neil, Terry, CJ and most likely a bunch of other guys from this very deep team will not start next season as Blazers. Here's the article for anyone that wants to see the reasoning behind that tweet. https://www.espn.com/basketball/sto...iew-wins-standings-projected-all-30-nba-teams
