2015-16 NBA Preview: Portland TrailBlazers

PORTLAND TRAILBLAZERS

Portland has gone through a major reconstruction, bringing back only one starter after two years in the playoffs and 50 plus wins. They’re completely written off now, and in a deep conference they’re an afterthought. They still have several good players and will be a fair distance from rock bottom.

2015 in review:

Portland started the season extremely well and looked like one of the best teams in the league with a 5.5 net rating. They were even battling injuries, with Robin Lopez breaking his hand and LaMarcus Aldridge injuring his own hand. Then Wesley Matthews got injured, and everything unraveled. Arron Afflalo was thrust into a starting role and bombed; the defense was particularly abhorrent. They limped to the finish line with a mere 1.5 net rating, aided by a division quirk, and were mercy-eliminated by the Grizzlies in the first round. The team was quickly disbanded in the summer, leaving one to wonder what could have been.

Rotation players in: Gerald Henderson, Ed Davis, Al-Farouq Aminu, Mason Plumlee, Noah Vonleh, Maurice Harkless.

Rotation players out: LaMarcus Aldridge, Wesley Matthews, Nicolas Batum, Robin Lopez, Steve Blake, Arron Afflalo.

As one can see from the above names, while the Blazers lost a lot of good players, they’re bringing in many guys too and many are decent role players. In losing their four starters though they’re losing a ton of shooting and defense and Robin Lopez’s diabolical plan to destroy a few NBA mascots with a shoddily built dam outside Springfield. Steve Blake was a solid extra point guard who competed on defense and could hit open shots. Afflalo was a bust, as his 3/D label got exposed, and he doesn’t fit into their rebuilding project.

Coming over from Charlotte, Gerald Henderson is a good defender but a shaky shooter. Nonetheless, he’s a decent role player even for a playoff team. Ed Davis is a dying species as a non-defensive power forward who doesn’t have range, but he’ll get another opportunity with the Blazers. Al-Farouq Aminu projects to be one of their best players and should lock down the small forward slot. He’s rangy like Nic Batum, but unlike Batum his jumper is well below average. Mason Plumlee (the younger NBA Plumlee) is an uber-athletic seven-footer with questionable defense and sky-high efficiency.

2016 Projected

The team with the largest disparity between expected results (i.e. Vegas) and analytically modelled predictions might be Portland, and no one’s talking about them like that. Boston is the popular pick generating a lot of discussion, while no one even cares enough to get upset that some people consider Portland as a 35+ win team.

Damian Lillard is the lone starter returning, and he’s a durable scorer who can provide a large amount of value. When the Blazers struggled after the Matthews injury, he lost some of his luster, but virtually every objective measure puts him solidly in a star category. Even though his three-point percentage slumped for a long stretch, he was still an efficient scorer thanks to his shot selection and his huge improvement at converting at the rim. If there’s a fear at what will happen without much support, he should be one of the best cases in the league to have a constant green light — he’s a fantastic shooter and can shoot off the dribble as well as anyone not named Stephen Curry. His defensive question marks are legitimate, but it doesn’t override his offensive value and if he were a good defender he’d be an MVP caliber player.

Working with the fourth year point guard, Portland’s frontcourt is stacked with options. The easiest way to argue against Portland’s incompetence is by laying out their synergy with Damian Lillard and their shooting big men who can space the floor and Mason Plumlee’s high-wire act. Together, Lillard and Plumlee should be one of the best pick-and-roll tandems in the league. Ed Davis has similar skills and this could become a strength on the team.

The other part of the frontcourt, excluding the delightfully insane Chris Kaman, is Noah Vonleh and Meyers Leonard. Both are great shooters for their size, and Leonard quite notably finished the season with 50-40-90 percentages (he didn’t have enough attempts to qualify, however) and a combined shooting percentage[4. Combined shooting percentage is simply 2PTFG% + 3PTFG% + FT%. It’s a quick way to rank best overall shooters.] up there with Kyle Korver and Stephen Curry. Vonleh displayed three-point range in pre-season, and it means Portland has two floor-spacing big men with actual big man size.

Leonard was one of the few bright spots towards the end of last season. FiveThirtyEight characterizes it oddly, not impressed with his season, but the point is that he was not an NBA-level player for the first two years of his career and then transformed his game with exquisite shooting and better rebounding and defense. Fans had mostly given up on him, and now he’s a super interesting piece as a three-point bombing seven-footer. Plus, with two big men with range, there’s enough spacing to use Aminu heavily or a big man like Ed Davis.

The other reason for optimism coming out of last season was the improvement of CJ McCollum. His rookie season was limited by injury before it even began, and he never had a good opportunity to develop and learn the NBA’s nuances. He had a few great moments late last season, and projects as a decent bench scorer, which will be sorely needed this season with all the veteran exits.

Portland’s offense could be great for a rebuilding team, but their defense could be ugly. They have a lot of young big men who have no track record of defending competently with a backcourt featuring Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum with a few other young guys thrown in. Gerald Henderson and Al-Farouq Aminu should help, since both players are plus defenders, but they can only do so much and there will probably be only one of them on the court at a time. There’s a possibility Mason Plumlee finally uses his athleticism effectively on defense, or someone like Noah Vonleh develops quickly, but that’s just a possibility and not a guarantee. Their defense will keep them in the lottery.

Quick statistic/graph

Defensive rebounding is a difficult subject to tackle with basic data because picking up a defensive board doesn’t equate to a corresponding credit. Another player can box-out and create that board for a teammate, and then there are players, usually smaller guys, who run inside and grab a board near a teammate. SportVU data can help by fleshing out more context.

Just recently, stats.NBA.com revamped a few of their stats including SportVU rebounds and added information for “deferred” rebounds where a player is within 3.5 feet of a rebound but a teammate grabs it. Since it’s a new stat and hasn’t been evaluated publicly, it’s difficult to say exactly what it means, but it could be a useful proxy for team rebounding/stealing. For example, in the below table there are a few big men without rebounding totals that leap off the page but are associated with high defensive plus/minus scores, like Amir Johnson, Zaza Pachulia, and Nerlens Noel. Ed Davis had the second highest rate in the league last season, so perhaps he’s a better rebounder than his box score stats indicate because he lets teammates grab the board when possible[6. Michael Kidd-Gilchrist was first, which may help explain a little why Charlotte defended so well with him. But Charlotte was also the best defensive rebounding team in the league, so there were probably more teammates near the board than on an average team.].

Table: SportVU deferred DRB’s per minute, 2015 (source: stats.NBA.com)

Summary

Portland’s an overlooked team seen as a deep lottery team with little talent. But Damian Lillard is an exceptional scorer with rare shooting skills and he’ll have great pick-and-roll options and two long-range bombing frontcourt players. People are notoriously poor at evaluating supporting casts as a whole, lumping them all into the same bin. But their role players aren’t bad and they don’t look like the typical tanking squad. Unless they tear things down more, they should clear 30 wins and Lillard will be one of the top scorers in the league.

PBP-Metric[1. This is the initial version of my own metric, which uses a full range of stats collected from play-by-play logs and tested extensively to avoid overfitting.]: 37.9

PT-PM: 33

Nick‘s[2. For a short description, the predictions use regression models and neural networks to apply various stats like BPM, RAPM, and Win Shares to 10,000 simulations of the season game-by-game to select the “best” result.]: 38

Nathan Walker: 43