Trail Blazers Playoff Preview: Portland and the long, winding road to growth
We take it for granted sometimes that an NBA team’s growth will be rational and predictable. We expect it to follow a progression that makes sense to us mathematically — franchises’ win totals should show patterns from year to year that are linear, or perhaps parabolic for the truly special teams that break out quickly. And yet it so rarely works out this way in real life. Basketball teams and their players are human; they have their faults and their foibles, and they don’t always fit neatly into graphs. Instead of slopes or y-intercepts, they have creaky knees and broken jump shots. Growth, therefore, is never automatic. It must always be earned.
Few teams understand this better than the 2016-17 Trail Blazers, who stumbled through the winter months at 10-plus wins under .500 and had to fight like the dickens to earn the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference playoffs. According to the narratives we all accepted without a second thought back in October, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Blazers were supposed to improve steadily. Last year’s team won 44 games despite going through a major overhaul in the summer of 2015; general manager Neil Olshey had successfully rebuilt his roster on the fly around once-unheralded secondary guys like Al-Farouq Aminu, Ed Davis and Mason Plumlee. Those 44-game winners were still young and, presumably, developing. It made sense to pencil the Blazers in for 48 or so wins this season, then 52ish and maybe a brush with legit West contender status the year after.
It didn’t happen that way. The very players who helped the Blazers break out in 2015-16 were major contributors to their undoing in 2016-17. Aminu missed a big chunk of November with a strained calf, then came back in December and shot a grotesque 27 percent from 3. Davis messed up his shoulder, struggled to play hurt and was done for the year after Feb. 23. Plumlee was the subject of trade rumors for much of the year, and by the All-Star break he’d been shipped to Denver. Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum remained the team’s two best players, and they kept trucking along, but the cast around them was crumbling. For a long stretch around midseason, the Blazers were 30th in the NBA in defense. Their record at the end of February was 24-35. They were dead in the water.
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They proceeded to finish the season 17-6. It’s too facile to say the arrival of Jusuf Nurkic, who made his Portland debut on Feb. 15 after being traded for Plumlee, was the only reason why. But good god, Nurkic was a revelation. He’d been miscast in Denver as a co-star with Nikola Jokic in a Twin Towers-style frontcourt pairing. When he arrived in Portland, it became clear that his destiny was to be a one-man machine in the middle finishing pick-and-rolls. His presence down low opened everything up for the Blazers’ offense. He became a true go-to center, something Rip City hadn’t had since seven years ago when Greg Oden was able to stay healthy for a few minutes. He brought an immediate gravitational pull on opposing defenses, which opened oodles of open space for the team’s perimeter shooters. Lillard, McCollum, Allen Crabbe and even Evan Turner instantly became markedly better. Third-year power forward Noah Vonleh, who barely looked like an NBA player pre-Nurkic, began looking like a star alongside the Bosnian beast. Vonleh and Nurkic were plus 13.1 points per 100 possessions in 306 minutes together this season. Nurk and Moe Harkless were similarly brilliant at plus 8.9.
The weird thing is that even when their newfound star center went away, the Blazers’ sparkling play continued. Nurkic missed the final two weeks of the season with a fractured fibula; the Blazers during that time went 4-2. Their big fella was gone, but all the good habits he created were still there. The floor remained impeccably spaced, and the Blazers’ shooters kept hitting — especially Lillard, who went off for a ridiculous 59 points in a surprise win over Utah in the season’s final weekend. The Blazers remained in rhythm offensively and (relatively) stout defensively. The system still worked.
All of this is encouraging for the Blazers’ long-term development, yet all of it is almost certainly meaningless this postseason. It should be obvious why. The Blazers are now the bottom seed in the West, which means they have a date with the mighty Warriors in late April, which means they should be comfortably lounging on their couches by early May. In a way, that’s a bummer. The Blazers are not winning a title this spring. Even if Nurkic does come back strong (and it’s unclear whether he will), this team is toast in the playoffs.
It’s debatable, though, whether that matters. When you’ve been through the adversity this team’s been through, any playoff appearance at all is a gift. Remember: This team was 24-35 six weeks ago. They weren’t even supposed to be here today. That they’re here at all is a resounding success story, and a lot of people deserve a share of the credit for that success. Olshey certainly does; likewise for coach Terry Stotts, who took on the underratedly difficult challenge of integrating Nurkic at midseason (mind you, with no practice time) and handled it admirably. Lillard, McCollum, Nurkic, Harkless and the rest of the roster all merit kudos of their own.
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That’s what this playoff appearance is — an acceptance speech. For the next four or five games, the Blazers can bask in the knowledge that they beat the odds and fought their way into the playoffs when no one thought they would. They can play a few games on national TV, soak up their props and their felicitations, then go home happy. The Blazers earned this. Their growth this season wasn’t rational, it wasn’t predictable and it didn’t happen because some numbers on a spreadsheet said it was supposed to. It fell into place, bizarrely, because a malcontent 22-year-old backup center from a mediocre team jolted them into becoming something they weren’t.
They’ll spend the next week and a half celebrating that.