The Step Back has been born from the aesthetics and traditions of the Hardwood Paroxysm Basketball Network. In the past, Hardwood Paroxysm has produced a massive stand-alone season preview. This year, that preview effort has been rolled up into the launch of The Step Back.
The Step Back’s writers and illustrators have prepared a hefty deep-dive into each team, built from multiple smaller sections. This year’s theme is television comedies and each section is named after some of our favorite sitcoms. For links to all 30 teams, as well as details about the focus of each section, check out our guide on how to read this preview.
Community
By Evans Clinchy (@evansclinchy)
As far as “playing with house money” seasons go, there are few in NBA history quite comparable to that of the 2015-16 Portland Trail Blazers. Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum may as well have been George Clooney and Brad Pitt in “Ocean’s Eleven,” because they had bags and bags full of the casino’s cash and they were strolling right out with it.
There were absolutely no expectations on the Blazers last season. They were reeling from the losses of not just LaMarcus Aldridge, but three other members of a starting five that had led them to back-to-back postseasons. The roster that remained was basically Lillard and a heap of spare parts. It surprised no one when this team struggled out of the gate, going 11-20 between opening night and Christmas; that was to be expected. You all know what happened next, though. Portland won 33 of its final 51 games, climbed all the way to the No. 5 spot in the Western Conference and even stole a playoff round. No one saw any of that coming. The Blazers began the season with nothing to lose, and by May, it turned out they’d gained a lot.
This year will be different. Here’s the thing — the Blazers last season were content to take it slow. The assumption was they were in year one of a four-year rebuilding plan, so it was OK to let their guard down a little bit. They experimented with some funky lineups, let some winnable games slip away and allowed certain young players extraordinarily long leashes. Noah Vonleh — Noah Vonleh! — started 56 games. That was then; this is now. The rebuild has been sped along. This is no longer a happy-go-lucky gang of youngsters — this is a serious team that Neil Olshey invested almost $350 million this summer in keeping and developing. This year, every game matters.
Last year’s team messed around and got 44 wins. The new Blazers will aspire to do better than that, but it won’t be easy. The current roster is mighty similar to last season’s with just a couple of modest changes. Evan Turner gives Portland a playmaking wing, but he’s only a slight upgrade from Gerald Henderson, and while Festus Ezeli offers some rim protection, Terry Stotts can’t play him without sacrificing the offense he’d get from another option at center, like Mason Plumlee or Meyers Leonard. For the most part, this is the same team it was a year ago. Portland will have to hope for some improvement from its young talent (Allen Crabbe, Moe Harkless, Plumlee and Leonard all come to mind) and a major jolt to a team defense that was 20th in the league last season.
Those things are not guaranteed to happen. The Blazers might just roll it back and win another 44; they might, with a little regression and some rough injury luck, fall back into the 30s. This is problematic because now, the stakes are higher. The Blazers aren’t playing with house money anymore; they’re playing with Paul Allen’s, and tons of it. It’s time for all of them to prove they’re worth it.
The Odd Couple
By Derek James (@DerekJamesNBA)
NBA 2K16 had Evan Turner down pat. After demanding a trade from the Rockets, my MyPlayer was dealt to the Philadelphia 76ers. They weren’t nearly as good as the Rockets but I was going to have a chance to put up a lot of numbers on an expiring deal. It was going to be great, or so I thought.
It turns out that the Sixers had re-signed Evan Turner in the same summer they traded for me. Not only that, they started him next to my MyPlayer — a ball-dominant, volume-shooting point guard. The results were as bad as expected. Turner was incapable of making quick decisions with the ball, like catching and shooting. Turner, instead, consistently opted for 20 seconds of dribbling and a rushed pass back to me at the end of the shot clock or taking his own bad shot.
It was maddening and I kept hoping to meet with my GM in hopes of finding a “Player X” needs to go option. But that moment never came and I left in free agency.
Now, Turner goes to Portland, in real life, on a four-year, $72 million dollar deal. With Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum entrenched in the starting lineup, this seems like a strange fit. Turner has, for much of his career, needed the ball in his hands to be effective. When he doesn’t, he tends to fade into the background. This is a problem for a couple of reasons.
Turner became much less of a high usage player in his two seasons in Boston. While bringing his usage rate down and assist percentage up to career bests, his turnovers increased. Per 100 plays, Turner turned the ball over 18.3 times. For reference, league average is 12 times per 100 plays. The majority of these errors came from bad passes. Regardless of where they came from, it’s not encouraging to see Turner’s usage drop and their turnovers increase.
Taking the ball out of Lillard and McCollum’s hands and into Turner’s is risky. A big reason is that Turner is a moribund three-point shooter. It’s just not his thing. Since 2012-13 when he shot 36.5 from deep, these are his percentages since: 32.1, 27.7, and 24.1 percent. While Turner’s jumper doesn’t open up the floor, the Blazers were the fourth-best three-point shooting team last season. If they can continue to spread opposing defenses, it may not matter what Turner does.
What may help is less dribbling. Turner took 3-7+ dribbles on 53 percent of his shots last season. When he took more than seven, he shot 40.8 percent. Funny enough, his field goal percentage was identical when he took zero dribbles as he did 3-to-6 dribbles (47.8 vs 47.7). That’s a lot of extra work for the same results.
Leading the bench unit may be ideal for Turner. That way he can handle the ball and has enough help on the second unit to need not do everything. There’s a place for Turner but ensuring the Blazers don’t throw off the rhythm of what their two best players did last season is important.
Seinfeld
By Daniel Rowell (@danieljrowell)
Every season, basketball begins anew and we gravitate to a single question: who you got? It’s only natural. I mean, in a certain way, sports are all about winning and in particular the goal of any team is to win a championship. So that question is not necessarily a bad question. At the intersection of basketball and blogging the discussion inevitably gravitates to a ranking — ‘who is the best?’ — and then — ‘why isn’t this team better?’ — and maybe finally — ‘how then could this team get better?’. For the Portland Trail Blazers, that line of questioning can be a bit depressing.
For three straight seasons, the Blazers have made the playoffs in the Western Conference, a conference that has proven more talented and challenging all three years. But for a team with three-consecutive playoff appearances, it is hard to say that the Blazers are much better. In 2014, a young and breakout team surprised the Houston Rockets 4-2 in the opening round behind the rising star and commander in clutch Damian Lillard. In 2015, a team set back with injuries limped to a 1-4 loss at the hands of the Memphis Grizzlies but discovered a second breakout guard in CJ McCollum. And in 2016, with the departures of over half the starting five, a re-invented and scrappy team came back from a 2-0 deficit to beat an injured Clippers squad and even won a game against a 73-win Warriors squad.
Is this team in 2017 better than the top teams in the West — a healthy Clippers squad, a fortified Spurs team with an ex-Blazer, and a 73-win team with the addition of a former MVP? No. They just are not. And that’s where the line of questioning gets really depressing. Because this is a team that beat the Clippers last season, but wasn’t really better than that Clippers team, just healthier. And so through three seasons of playoffs this team projects to be slightly better but looking up at the same Western Conference Semifinals ceiling.
Why aren’t they better? They have a talented two guard tandem in Lillard and McCollum that are difficult to contain, but lack a third option and in particular a stretch-four kind of player to balance them out. Plus, defensively Lillard is average if not a bit disadvantaged and they lack the rim protection to make up for that. The best Blazers might have been the 2014 version — who had health and a inside option and rebounder in LaMarcus Aldridge. And that’s sad because the 2015 and 2016 versions of the Blazers were so much fun — just ran into injuries and perhaps outperformed their talent.
It’s like that line from Elaine at the Chinese Restaurant: “Remember when you first went out to eat with your parents? Remember, it was such a treat. You go and they serve you this different food that you never saw before. They put it in front of you and it was such a delicious and exciting adventure and now I just feel like a big sweaty hog waiting for them to fill up the trough.”
Remember the 2014 Blazers and that game winner Dame hit to beat the Rockets? It was such a treat. It just seems to me that if you took that team from 2014 and mashed it up with the talent and maturity of Lillard/McCollum (and Allen Crabbe and Meyers Leonard) you’d have a title contending team. They would be SO GOOD if they had a stretch four that was as talented as LaMarcus Aldridge. And the saddest part about all of that is Dame is still on the team. The most exciting and talented part of the 2014 team was there in 2015 and there in 2016. He is fun to watch, just depressing when you ask how his team gets better. And now I’m just a big sweaty blogger complaining about a stretch-four from two seasons ago.
Perfect Strangers
by Matt D’Anna (@hoop_nerd)
Ten Word Analysis: Fantastic spacing, not sure the new additions help that much.
TeamSPACE charts are based on mapped clusters of shot activity. These areas are affectionately called Hunting Grounds, because they are the areas on the court where a player hunts for shots — and successfully scores most often. TeamSPACE takes the Hunting Grounds of all five players in a lineup and puts them on the court together — because, you know, they have to share that physical space, and there is only one ball.
In the past, it was one color per player; which meant that blending colors represented overlapping spaces for shot activity. But this time around, these are not your ordinary TeamSPACE shot maps. Each lineup is analyzed in the aggregate — one color! — and that unit is compared that unit to the rest of the league. So you will see a persistent red layer on every chart, highlighting the league’s Hunting Grounds from last season. The most prolific locations should come as no surprise: the paint, the corners, most of the top of the arc, and a couple of dabs at the foul line and top of the key.
So…how were these lineups chosen for each team? In the past, it’s been about projecting the starting lineup, estimating the most used lineup, or even designing the “most favoritest” lineup. This year? It’s the these charts represent the “most interestingly feasible” lineups….what? That’s a loaded phrase, so let’s unpack it a bit.
The goal is to identify the collection of five players on a team that could potentially play together, and if they did, the offensive results could be glorious. Ideally these lineups aren’t too far-fetched, but also slightly off-kilter and confusing to an opposing defense. While this type of analysis is not conducive for assessing defense, somewhat reasonable decisions are attempted to be made. So while it’s tempting to just put all the best shooters together…how realistic is it (outside of Houston, at least)? And, full disclosure: I favor some stretch in my lineups. It not only provides plenty of high-octane potential, but getting stretchy is also on par with current league-wide trends.
Each TeamSPACE chart has a couple of other sitcom-related features:
Family Matters: You’ll notice a series of Jaleel White’s across half court. Each lineup is scored on a scale of 0-7 Steve Urkels for how well it matches league-wide trends. Remember, there’s seven league Hunting Grounds (right corner three; at the rim; left corner three; foul line/top of the key; right wing; middle 3pt; left wing). A lineup gains points for matching each area; it loses points for messy excess shot activity.
Odd Couple: “Most interestingly feasible” is obviously debatable, so in order to account for some of those decisions, you’ll see Oscar and Felix on each chart. Often, there are players that are in the lineup…and maybe/probably they should not be. They get the Oscar label. And, there are those players that are out of the lineup…and maybe/probably should be included. They are the Felix for their team.
And briefly, a word about data. These strange visual displays are based on last season’s shot data, weighted by made buckets — so rookies and season-long injuries are sadly excluded. This analysis is nothing without the help of Darryl Blackport, and the research materials available at Basketball-Reference and NBA.com. Further, these charts feature some of the best logo re-designs I could curate from the ol’ Information Superhighway, including Dribbble.com and Pinterest. I made none of the logos; I merely selected some of my favorites. Enjoy!
Everybody Loves Raymond
By Matt Cianfrone (@Matt_Cianfrone) and Chris Barnewall (@ChrisBarnewall)
Matt Cianfrone: So the Portland Trailblazers are one of the more interesting teams regarding the who is the most likable player on the team question. The answer really comes down to two guys, Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum.
I’ll take CJ every day and twice on Sundays and, honestly, I just don’t get the argument for Dame. So enlighten me? Why do you think Lillard?
Chris Barnewall: Really I don’t see how it could be anybody else on the Blazers besides Lillard.
Just the way that he carries himself is that of a superstar. Look at his comments the other day about how he doesn’t want to play on a super team. The guy is competitive, confident, and his style of play is just flat out fun.
Add on that he already has a career highlight moment with that gamewinner against the Rockets a few years back, and I don’t see how anybody can’t love this guy. I have nothing against McCollum, but Lillard just has that star factor.
Cianfrone: See that part of Lillard is what turns me off of him. I don’t mind guys playing with a chip on their shoulder, I love Isaiah Thomas for it. But Dame feels like he tries WAY too hard to find those chips. Everything that is ever said or written about him and the Blazers turns into something he is mad at. I’m just not a fan, even though I love his game.
CJ on the other hand feels like a really normal guy. He speaks on a lot of different issues and does it eloquently. It is very Chris Boshian and I appreciate that. Also the journalism thing. I like having weird stuff like that in common with NBA players.
Barnewall: I think Lillard is just more likely to express those chips on his shoulder than other players which is why we hear about it more. He’s a very open player, and isn’t afraid to speak his mind which is part of what’s endearing about him. Every player uses even the smallest of slights as motivation for their game. It’s why they’re at where they are today.
McCollum is definitely a likable player, and I enjoy listening what he has to say, but McCollum is someone I’d want to discuss the election with. Lillard is someone I want to go to the bar with. Also, with confidence like that he would be 100 percent guaranteed the best wingman you could ever ask for.
Cianfrone: I’m not sure what to make about you deciding that you need players to be good wingmen to be likable but I’m just gonna roll with it.
Honestly that idea that McCollum would be able to talk about anything is why I enjoy him so much. I’m sure that most NBA players could talk about a lot of things that many people wouldn’t expect but CJ showing it is what makes him so fun. He is a great Twitter follow. He cracks jokes, tweets highlights that he appreciates and mixes in the serious stuff along the way.
At the end of the day CJ just seems like a generally cooler, more relaxed guy than Dame.
*Dame proceeds to use this section to motivate himself to score 50 a game this year.