Not much has changed with the Portland Trail Blazers. Ever since they overperformed two season ago, they are locked into what they are. Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum tried to recruit Carmelo Anthony to Portland, but when that didn’t happen, the Blazers’ biggest offseason move became getting out of Allen Crabbe’s contract.
And that is fine, at least kind of. Having Lillard and McCollum as a backcourt duo gets you somewhere. Maybe it’s not as far as they’d like, but they play in the West and such is life. The rest of their roster — Mo Harkless, Ed Davis, Al-Farouq Aminu, etc. — is solid and dependable and generally do good things. But they also are what they are.
As currently constructed, there is only one player on the roster capable of change. Or, to be accurate, show that changes made last season are for real. That player is Jusuf Nurkic.
Before coming to the Blazers in a trade last season, Nurkic seemed like a bust with the Denver Nuggets. As Nikola Jokic rose and blossomed into the best player on the team, Nurkic sulked. He seemed checked out on the team. By all accounts, he was a sunk cost.
But once he got to Portland, something changed in him. Maybe it was a new environment, maybe it was just sheer desire to prove people wrong, or maybe it was both. Whatever it was, Nurkic was a force with the Blazers and reminded people why he was a first round pick (and originally ahead of Jokic in Denver’s pecking order) in the first place.
With the Blazers, Nurkic looked like a completely different player. In Terry Stotts’ system, he began working out of the pick-and-roll and bulldozed his way to the rim. On defense, while not a traditional rim protector or even a good one, he tried and that made him good enough to backup Lillard and McCollum inside. Most interestingly for the Blazers, Nurkic’s per game assist average more than doubled, per Basketball-Reference. Out of the post and near the elbow, he dished to Lillard, McCollum and other Blazers cutting around the floor and opened up another dimension of Portland’s attack.
In the regular season, the Blazers went 14-5 with Nurkic — including 5-3 against playoff teams — to secure a postseason berth. Yes, they were dusted by the Warriors in round one and Nurkic wasn’t part of that series really due to an injury that caused him to miss about a month. But that 14-5 record was better basketball than they had played the entire year as teams had figured them out.
Here in lies the biggest question facing the Blazers this year: Can Nurkic keep that play up over the course of a full season and, ideally, in the playoffs. In his four NBA seasons, Nurkic has never played more than 65 games. He’s never played close to the 29.2 minutes per game he did with Portland last year either. He’s reportedly in great shape right now, but isn’t everyone supposedly in good shape at this point in the year? How will Nurkic look in February and March, after months off the season have gone by? And will he be the same motivated, bulldozing talent he was post trade last year?
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If all of that breaks right for Portland, there are still questions. It seems unlikely they’ll get close to the conference’s top four of Golden State, San Antonio, Houston and Oklahoma City. Below them, the Blazers are lumped in with teams like the Nuggets, Wolves and Jazz that all are competing for the playoffs. The Clippers and Grizzlies belong in that group, too.
So, how good is Nurkic really? And how far can a Lillard-McCollum-Nurkic core take in a loaded conference? The answers to those questions will shape Portland’s season.