Yeah, because one or two good defensive players cannot salvage a defense where everyone else in the rotation is a negative. We're seeing that again this year. Even if the Blazers had Gobert instead of Whiteside last year I don't really think we would have been that much better.
Even in the bubble the Blazers didn't play very well as a team despite going 6-2 and were a Caris Levert jumper away from not even making the play-in game. The coaching has been awful the last two seasons. The difference between last season and this season is the roster is deeper to make the injuries less significant but make no mistake the coaching is not doing this roster any favors either.
I would maybe buy that excuse if at least half our losses weren't to teams that had much less talent than us, even with the injuries.
Also, a stat that is sobering this year is looking at our losses to "good" teams. Utah -20 Clippers -23 Milwaukee -28 Phoenix -32 SAS -21 Indiana -23 Getting destroyed by the teams you are going to face in the playoffs is not a good sign. Of course some of these games are without CJ/Nurk. You have to be ecstatic that our record gives us some breathing room considering the injuries, but they better hope to put together some good performances when CJ/Nurk are actually back. The hope is that we are playing good basketball by the time the playoffs arrive.
Are you talking about last year? I'd argue our talent post Hood/Collins injury was about on-par with those bad teams. Dame was the one positive player. Everyone else was a negative, including CJ and on most nights, Whiteside. They had Melo playing 32 minutes a night for crying out loud. Mario and Simons were playing big minutes, Tolliver even. Good lord. Single superstars definitely have more impact in basketball as they do other sports, but there's a limit to what one player can do, especially when that one player also plays just one side of the court.
Lol I am no where near a Homer around these parts. I'd be leaning more to pessimist than anything. But I will call bs on either side lol.
It's his dribbling. He's still not great dribbler like Lillard and McCollum, but being around them has improved his dribbling. That's the first step toward becoming a creator, which Stotts' lousy system requires to be a scorer.
LOL. We are not going to face Indiana (who may not even make the playoffs) or San Antonio in the playoffs. That said, we have beaten the Lakers, Sixers twice (including a blowout) and Dallas and Toronto both of whom are better than their record. Warriors have a better record than Indiana and we have beaten them twice including a blowout. We also beat a Rockets team with an A+ Harden performance and a healthy Wood. You’re not telling the whole story. And regular season means nothing when discussing matchups in playoffs. OKC swept us 4-0 in 2018-19 but we beat them 4-1 in playoffs.
It’s not a mystery. We had really bad players playing significant minutes. Carmelo BPM -3.6 Simons BPM -4.5 Bazemore BPM -3.2 Mario BPM -2.9 Tolliver -3.3 Swannigan -5.6 We still have bad players (Hood, Simons, Melo) but not as many and they’re not as bad (Hood is worse but he’s one guy).
just a quibble, but the median/generic BPM on a team 7 games over .500 is going to be higher than on a team 4 games under .500 I'm not sure how you'd normalize the BPM's between the two Blazer teams something else: last year, 4 players (Dame-Whiteside-Nurk-CJ) had positive BPM's. This year, only two players (Dame-CJ) have positive BPM's. On the other hand, this year, only 4 players have BPM's lower than -3.0. Last year, 9 players were worse than -3.0
Do you mean because a player’s BPM is in part based on a team’s plus minus? I don’t see any reason to want to normalize that away. It’s meant to be there. Or maybe you are referring to something else. If we’re talking about regular season success (WL record) I would say 3 positive players last year given that Nurk didn’t play much. All in all last year’s team could be predicted to suck based on overall BPM’s from prior years including the positive players. So it was not surprising at all that we sucked. This year’s team could be predicted to be way above 0.500 based on the last few years BPM’s, though I’m sure, given the injuries to Nurk and CJ, we have overachieved by a lot so far. This 21-14 is more like how we “should” have performed without injury, not taking our weak SOS into account.
They also swept the 1 seed in the East without CJ and Nurkic. This place is so fucking negative. I don’t get it.
