Are the Blazers really good enough to consistently blow bad teams out? Certainly not in the past with our bench. I like our team because they play hard and they play best when it counts....in crunch time. (Lillard time) But I don't really think our talent is much better (if any) than most other teams. Every team has talent. The Blazers seem to just have players who fit well together. But if you look at them individually compared to their opposition, there is not much difference in talent level. I do agree that they often play down to their competition, but that is common unless you are an elite team. We are not elite. But if we can excel in crunch time we will have a shot to be a contender. The mind set of this team must accept that every game will be tough unless they bring their A game. They just are not good enough to win any other way. The league has a lot of parity.
I agree with this. One thing that I think separates this team from some of the other "contenders" is just how well the players are willing to buy into the roles Stotts has given them. Even though there are a lot of players who are on a contract year, there's been no sense of anybody bitching about playing time or not getting shots.
I think it's because those contract players want to stay here. How often do key guys leave us via FA?
Blow them out? no. But the sign of a good team is not allowing teams you should beat to jump up on you by 10/16/24+. Yes they're NBA players for a reason everyone can play. Players can get hot and some nights there is nothing you can do to stop someone. To take the next step the Blazers are fighting with themselves on bringing that intensity night in and night out. Police themselves. Jabari Young mentioned that was talked about in the locker room last night after the game.
And not because Jamal Crawford is hitting 20 shots randomly. I'm still gunshy about blowouts because of him and that cursed year, but this seems so much more solid and sustainable.
Last season I was definitely critical of our W/L record. I saw lots of wins but was concerned about the quality of the wins and knew that a collapse was on the horizon. Oddly enough, I don't feel that way this season. I say "oddly enough" because the situations are eerily similar: beating teams with injured starters, blowing out bad teams, etc. We haven't played many good teams, and the few times we have we've lost - our only good win being against DAL. But I'm just not concerned about playing above our heads this year, and the resulting crash that always comes.
Last year our +/- was 4.0. We won a lot of games, but not comfortably. That took a toll. Not.This.Year.
Yep! Our SRS, which is basically margin of victory weighted by strength of schedule, is 11.68, good for second best in the NBA behind Golden State at 11.77 Let's keep it up!
If you go back and look at some threads from early last season you'll find quite a few posters very excited about our record and talking about the number one seed, etc. However there were a few of us saying to be cautious because Wes and company were not going to continue shooting like they started. We were right and things started to fall of later. Plus we had no defense to bail us out. Now I'm more excited because I don't feel the same this year. I feel that the way we're playing seems much more sustainable and not so dependent on extremely hot shooting. And our defense can actually get us through shooting slumps.
Our defense whether it be ppg or eff is great. Check out these stats: http://www.teamrankings.com/nba/team-stat/scoring-defense And look at the last 3 games, under 89 ppg. Fantastic.
pretty sure that was kingspeed with the number one seed talk.. also possible that there was a full mags sighting..
