The 2015-16 NBA Season starts in less than two weeks, preseason hoops are in full swing, and playoff prognostications have begun in earnest. Since season previews can get bogged down by team-specific minutiae, and we cover every basketball team, we’re providing our readers reasons why you should care about all 30 teams in the Association.
DIME MAG’s 2015-16 NBA Season Previews
The 2015-16 Portland Trail Blazers bare little resemblance to the 2014-15 variety. Gone are starters LaMarcus Aldridge, Wesley Matthews, Robin Lopez and Nicolas Batum. In their place Portland’s got Meyers Leonard as a stretch five, Ed Davis as LMA, Al-Farouq Aminu in place of Batum, and Gerald Henderson instead of Wes (but really it’ll be C.J. McCollum because Henderson’s hip will prevent him from starting the season and Blazers brass has high hopes for McCollum).
That’s a pretty drastic change, but GM Neil Olshey did a great job rebuilding on the fly instead of trying to patch a contender together when they were a step below the top-tier teams in the West even with LMA and a healthy Wes.
A step below contenders is still a good place to be, especially in the West. A couple injuries, some lucky matchups and all of a sudden you’re holding the Larry O’Brien trophy. We saw the Mavericks do it in 2011 and the Warriors do it last year with a rookie head coach, a scorching backcourt, and the glaring absences of the Clippers and Spurs on their path to the chip.
For any team right below title contender status, you’re positioned to ascend the throne if a preseason favorite falters. Now, apologies to the Dubs, who were just as good as they were lucky, but the Blazers were just as poised before Wesley’s Achilles ruptured, and so imploded the latest version of Rip City.
But this year’s squad should be fun and Olshey put perfect pieces in place to salvage a decent group, but also with an eye toward the future. Despite some offseason maneuvering and the pragmatic way Portland looks to prop up so many departing starters, we’ve got another season of Damian Lillard, the sole remaining starter left and the inheritor of a cushy new max deal. Dame is the man now, which means we get to pick apart his defense — by far the worst part of his game.
There are plenty of reasons to care about this year’s Blazers team, here are just two.
Watching them grow from the ground up with a perfectly timed rebuild
The Portland Trail Blazers were 30-8 in mid-January. They had the league’s second-best record, propelled by elite play on both ends of the floor that almost no one outside of the Rose City saw coming. Why couldn’t a team with basketball’s eighth-best offense and third-best defense win a title?
The only answer is that its uniforms read “Trail Blazers.” Portland was supposed to play thorn in the side of real contenders come playoff time as opposed to actually being one of them, which is why league followers never quite took Terry Stotts’ squad seriously as a championship contender.
Today’s hindsight renders that hesitance apt, of course, but denies crucial context. The Blazers hadn’t quite rediscovered their pre- New Year dominance when Wes Matthews was lost for the season with a ruptured achilles in early March, yet were showing signs they might be able to do it. Neil Olshey obviously thought so, too – Portland surrendered a lottery-protected first-round pick to acquire Arron Afflalo at the trade deadline, a player who shored up arguably its biggest weakness but also would hit the free agent market just a few months later.
Despite their sluggish beginning to the season’s second half, the Blazers were still in win-now mode before Matthews went down. Once he did, though, any aspirations of a surprise trip to the NBA Finals were bound to prove that only. What made Portland so good was its killer starting five, and Matthews occupied a vital role on both ends of the floor in Stotts’ opening quintet. The Blazers were never going anywhere without him.
And fortunately for this franchise’s long-term future, upper management fully understood the limits of its team without Aldridge in tow. Now isn’t the time to look back on recent Portland teams of the past; this season marks a new era for the Blazers, and it will loom large to their direction irrespective of more immediate takeaway gleaned from the win-loss column.
But it could be instructive to wonder just how much the realistic limits on the organization’s recent squads influenced its summer roster upheaval. Was Portland ever really anything more than a second-tier contender? A team that could suddenly win a conference title due to multiple injuries suffered by clearly superior competition? Probably not, but that’s not necessarily an absolutely prohibitive problem, either. There are only so many franchises fortunate enough to employ a truly transcendent player, the ones that don’t require even more strokes of luck than the normal championship winner receives.
If they come, however, a team on the title periphery could find itself the last one standing come June. Nobody expected the Dallas Mavericks to hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy in 2011. Conversely, the Oklahoma City Thunder were supposed to dominate the West for a decade after winning it one year later. Championship windows can open and shut with a single gust in the NBA.
When Aldridge elected against continuing his career in the Pacific Northwest, the Blazers knew theirs was closed for multiple years going forward – no matter how open it ever really was. Olshey could have bettered the Dallas Mavericks’ offer to Matthews, and re-signed Robin Lopez, too. But he bit the bullet at the first opportunity instead, trading Nic Batum – who will hit the open market after 2015-16, by the way – for a gifted young big man one year removed from the lottery and snagging Al-Farouq Aminu with a cheap, multi-year deal mere moments after the clock struck July 1.
Portland placed a premium on maximizing upside while mitigating risk this summer. The team signed Aminu and Ed Davis to funky contracts that descend in salary as the cap will continue to rise; acquired Mason Plumlee and Mo Harkless, each of whom remain on rookie deals, for a late first- and second-round pick, respectively; and took chances on once-touted prospects like Phil Pressey and Cliff Alexander.
The result? Hordes of cap space both currently and for many years running, plus the flexibility accounted for by so many players who could easily be included in trades. Oh, and the promise associated with a rebuilding team most likely to hold all of its coming first-round picks.
The Blazers could be the worst team in the league this season. But as the Philadelphia 76ers and other less flagrantly non-competitive teams will tell you, that’s a far better place than the alternative of where Portland would have been if it opted against letting incumbents walk and shuffling the deck – especially when the re-building process is began with such an aggressive means of prudence.
Damian Lillard’s defense catching up to the rest of his game
It’s hard to castigate Lillard for his defensive woes over his first three years in the league. The Weber State grad and 2013 NBA Rookie of the Year has far exceeded expectations when the Blazers made him the No. 6 overall pick in June the year before. He’s done enough to warrant a max contract and as the requisite All-Star building block the Blazers kept as they usher in Rip City redux.
But he’s going to have to figure out a way to improve on the defensive end of the floor. We’re getting precariously close to James Harden circa 2013 levels and while Blazers fans will never forget his series-clinching game-winner over the Rockets in 2014, they should also be pretty tired of how out of position Lillard can look on the screen-and-roll.
In fact, simple on/off numbers reveal a lot. Last year’s Blazers gave up only 97.5 points per 100 possessions when Lillard was on the bench. That would have been the best defense in the league last year. But when he was on the court, that defensive rating ascended to 102.7, good for about middle of the pack in the league.
Lillard’s not the worst defender at his position, but he’s got a lot of room for improvement. Among point guards last year who finished in the top five in Wins Attributable to Real plus-minus (WAR), Lillard and Russell Westbrook were the only two with a negative real adjusted plus-minus. Then again, his was almost half as bad as Russ and Russ was even better than Kyrie Irving (No. 7 in WAR in the NBA).
Like we said, Dame isn’t awful, but he’s got to be better if he’s going to be Portland’s real leader. It starts on the pick-and-roll and the sloppy way Dame defends the high screen, specifically when he goes under it, or the offensive player tricks him by going away from the pick. On that last point, here’s Steph Curry and Russ shredding Dame late last season simply be feinting towards the pick before exploding the other way.
https://giant.gfycat.com/PoliteInsecureFallowdeer.gif
https://giant.gfycat.com/HarmlessLameFieldspaniel.gif
You might think, “but that’s Russ and Steph, two of the most effective driving point guards in the league!” Well, here’s rookie Zach LaVine doing the same thing.
https://giant.gfycat.com/DarlingLightheartedHeterodontosaurus.gif
That’s pretty bad. Dame is below average any time an offensive player goes away from the screen, or when he chooses to go under. Tony Parker exposed him badly in the Western Conference Semifinals in 2014, running him off so many screens, Dame eventually just wore down. Other point guards know that he’s weak any time that big guy shows, overplaying his hand by almost inadvertently icing the high pick in an effort to get over it.
It’s really hard to play defense against the gauntlet of point guards in the West, but how Lillard transitions to overall team leader with the absence of Aldridge or Matthews will be directly tied to his development on that end. If he’s still letting his man get into the lane without even going over the screen, it’ll be a lot harder for him to lead. As Carmelo is finding out in his 30s, stars have to hold themselves accountable on the defensive end before they attack their teammates. If they don’t, they lose the respect of the team.
With Aminu and McCollum, the Blazers have some semi-stout perimeter defenders, though McCollum’s defensive efficiency came against primarily second units. Lillard needs to bust his ass on that end while still acting as their primary catalyst on the offensive end, too.
Is this asking too much? Well, Dame did participate in all five events during the 2014 NBA All Star Game in New Orleans. He have faith. Regardless, it’s gonna be a ton of fun to watch him try.
