The Portland Trail Blazers got a lot of credit this summer for keeping their core intact and hedging their bets on the idea that they had another level they could reach this season. But much of that was born out of necessity. Once again, they were unable to lure any marquee free agents to town. So instead they gave Evan Turner $70 million as a sort of reluctant consolation prize.
Portland did a terrific job of building from within and filling in holes as it goes, but the team seems to be at a bit of an impasse. The Blazers are who they are. The question remains, is that enough to really push the status quo in the Western Conference?
Before last season, the Blazers’ bench was at or near the bottom of the league in scoring for several years in a row. They were still fairly middle-of-the-road in 2015-2016, but that was a dramatic improvement. They can’t afford to regress again in that department and still expect to climb the standings in the Western Conference and improve on their 44-win campaign from a year ago.
Their saving grace, of course, has been the MVP-level output of Damian Lillard, along with the ever-expanding scoring prowess of his backcourt mate C.J. McCollum, who put up a career-high 37 points in a win over the Grizzlies last Sunday, including 16 points in the fourth quarter to help the Blazers close out a tough road victory.
Lillard struggled in that game – going just 3-of-11 from the field – but again showed his leadership and unselfishness by deferring to McCollum in crunch time when the latter obviously had the hot hand. That particular performance notwithstanding, Lillard has been phenomenal. He’s shooting better than 50 percent from the floor, nearly 40 percent from three, and he’s currently second in the league in scoring at 32 points per game.
And his back-to-back three-pointers from the half-court logo against Dallas were a stark reminder that he might have the most range of any shooter in the NBA not named Steph Curry. So far, he’s lived up to every bit of the hype from the multiple experts who pegged him as an MVP candidate this year.
He and McCollum have combined to average more than 53 points per game, just under half of the Blazers’ total output. That’s a trend that continued in a win over the Suns on Tuesday night when they combined for 71 points. But the Blazers still barely eked out a three-point win against a team that is now just 2-6 on the season.
We know what we’re going to get with Lillard and McCollum, and we’re lucky to have that in the league. The Blazers always needed more, and with no big names on the horizon who could realistically come in and be that difference maker, Portland turned to Turner.
As a ball-pounding, mid-range enthusiast, Turner was always a curious fit for the Blazers’ offense, and the early returns have not exactly been promising. He’s a minus-15.7 for the season so far, and that number has been strikingly worse at various stretches.
There’s obviously a learning curve when you’re trying to figure out a new system, and Turner’s main issue seems to be that he’s pressing. It’ll be on Terry Stotts to figure out a way to play to his strengths. It’s still early, so there’s a chance he finds his groove as the season progresses and eventually starts to resemble the player who provided such a spark for the Celtics last season with his scoring and his scrappy defense.
The second unit will need that desperately if they ever want to climb out of the cellar. Through the first seven games, the Blazers haven’t gotten much production out of their bench. They currently rank 26th in scoring, with Allen Crabbe (another $70-plus million man) leading the way at just under nine points per game. He’s off to a slow start as well, especially considering the expectations that came with that massive contract.
His numbers are pretty much exactly where they were last season, but the Blazers were surely hoping he’d be much more aggressive going forward. He started out the season with a bang, scoring 18 points on opening night, but has logged single digits in four out of the last five games, including six points against Memphis, four points against Dallas, a two-point outing in a loss to Golden State last week, and a five point effort against the Suns.
Meyers Leonard, who took a step back in 2015-2016 after something of a breakout season the year prior, has likewise not been able to make significant contributions yet. And Ed Davis, although a strong defender and a beast on the glass, doesn’t have much of an offensive repertoire to speak of.
As with the bench, Portland isn’t getting much help yet from the rest of its starters. Al-Farouq Aminu has been perhaps the most frustrating of the bunch in the early going. Aminu was supposed to be the Blazers’ version of Jae Crowder for the foreseeable future, the type of 3-and-D utility player the league salivates after these days. He fulfilled that role quite nicely at times last season, but one of his biggest issues has always been his consistency.
So far this season, he’s struggled tremendously with his shot, converting just 25 percent from downtown and a dreadful 27.9 percent overall from the field. Aminu has never been a dead-eye marksman from the outside, but his 36 percent from behind the arc last season made him just enough of a reliable threat to create the type of floor spacing Stotts wants for the offense.
In the playoffs last spring, however, teams wised up and picked their poison, essentially daring Aminu to take wide-open threes and prove he can make them consistently while they focused their efforts on Lillard and McCollum. Certain teams are continuing that strategy, and it’s paying dividends.
Leaning so heavily on Lillard and McCollum probably isn’t sustainable, so the Blazers will eventually need to get some consistent production out of the rest of their peripheral players. Maurice Harkless has been a bright spot, especially with his breakout game against the Suns when he put up 20 points and six rebounds on 8-of-11 shooting and had several key plays down the stretch.
He’s assuming a much larger role this season (his minutes have jumped from 18 per game to over 30), and he’s definitely one of those players who has a lot of intangibles to his game that don’t necessarily show up in the box score, so his development is certainly something to keep an eye on as the Blazers continue to look for other players who can step up and make an impact.
Yet, even in a best-case scenario, it’s difficult to know exactly where the ceiling is and how much of a leap the Blazers are capable of. For better or for worse, this is the squad they’re riding with. Where that ride takes them is anybody’s guess.
Between extending McCollum and signing Turner, Crabbe, and Harkless, the Blazers are maxed out and pretty much locked in to this current roster, and several of those contracts will be very difficult to move if they want to make a trade before the deadline.
The Blazers at their best last season, despite surprising the league and overachieving to a remarkable extent, still finished the season just a few games above .500, not to mention that their feel-good run through the postseason was predicated in no small part to series-altering injuries to Chris Paul and Blake Griffin. Despite putting up a good fight in their unlikely second-round appearance, they still proved that they were no match against a Warriors team that was without its reigning MVP for the majority of the series.
Portland’s lofty goal is to make a run to the Western Conference Finals next spring, but they’re going to have to show dramatic improvement in several key areas for that to even be a remote possibility. In the meantime, they’re hoping the brilliance of Lillard and McCollum will be enough — and the rest falls into place.
