The Portland Trail Blazers have flipped the script from the past decade. While they’re finally putting together a high-level defense — though there are some questions about how sustainable it is — they’ve taken a major step back offensively after ranking in the top half of the league in offensive efficiency for the last nine seasons.
Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum are right where they’ve always been from an efficiency perspective, and McCollum in particular has taken another big step forward in his playmaking efforts. They’re getting high-level shooting from Pat Connaughton and Shabazz Napier, two players who haven’t been able to contribute positively playing significant minutes in their careers to this point. Even Al-Farouq Aminu, a defense-first forward, has been very efficient in the games he’s been able to play.
So what’s going wrong for the Trail Blazers that puts them in the bottom third of the league on that end of the floor? There are a multitude of problems for Portland offensively right now, including Evan Turner’s inability to score efficiently, but a place to focus is on post-ups. The Trail Blazers use 9.0 percent of their possessions on post-ups, most of which go to Jusuf Nurkic, and they score 0.77 points per trip, the fourth-worst mark in the league and an absolutely god-awful result for any halfcourt possession.
Read More: Thaddeus Young is the do-it-all big man the Pacers need
The worst halfcourt offense in the NBA scores 0.85 points per possession, and the Trail Blazers are seven points worse than that when they throw the ball into the post. Nurkic gets the majority of these looks — he’s responsible for more than half of all of Portland’s post-ups — and they’re even worse on his possessions, creating a measly 70.8 offensive rating in those situations. They throw him about five post-ups per game and are creating an offensive value 14 points worse than the Kings’ 30th-ranked halfcourt offense. If you haven’t figured it out by now, that’s really bad.
There are two main reasons Nurkic’s post game has been so poor this season: Portland doesn’t run enough pre-action to get him good position against an off-balance defender and he doesn’t fight for that position when he is able to get down there. He has relatively good hands, is capable of going over either shoulder and is big enough to back down pretty much anybody. In a league that eschews the traditional post-up, Nurkic has the skills to keep it alive, but the results just aren’t there for a team trying to contend for a berth in the second round of the playoffs.
Throwing away five possession per game to produce as little as Nurkic’s post-ups have created won’t work against good teams and certainly won’t work in the playoffs. He’s a good enough passer as well, but the offense gets stagnant around him when he catches in the post, feeding the cyclical nature of these things: the perimeter players don’t move because he rarely passes out and he rarely passes out because the perimeter players don’t move.
Nurkic’s unwillingness to fight for deep position before he gets the ball is antithetical to the contact he invites once he has possession. He’s happy to let his guy push him out to 15 feet, but once the ball is entered into the post, he goes to work, backing down his defender with ease to get back to that good position. Watch below how Jason Smith, all 240 pounds of him, forces the 280-pound Nurkic out toward the perimeter:
Once Nurkic catches, however, it’s an entirely different story. He goes right through Smith, getting into the paint with ease. How much easier would his life be if he fought for that kind of position before the ball was entered in the first place? Then he could take one dribble into Smith’s body to end up right under the basket and get a layup or dunk. The counterargument is Nurkic chooses to drift out to the perimeter to execute a possible dribble hand off with a perimeter player, but he then needs to give up the ball when that action doesn’t produce an advantage for his team.
Every so often, Portland’s guards will get him a post-up out of a pick-and-roll, trying to take advantage of a big man who gets caught out on the perimeter with the ball handler and is out of position. Once again, however, Nurkic gives up that great position:
Nurkic screens for Napier on the perimeter, but quickly slips the screen, leaving both Chandler Parsons and Marc Gasol on the perimeter and moving unmolested into the paint. He gets to the restricted area and instead of making camp there to get the pass from Lillard, he floats out toward the corner, eventually catching the ball two steps from the block. He converts on the ensuing battle with Gasol, but there’s very little that was good about the possession.
There are good moments for Nurkic in the post. As poor as his positioning is in halfcourt post-ups, he does get good position in semi-transition and early offense:
Now that’s more like it! When the rebound bounces away to a teammate, he sprints the floor hard and catches the ball at the top of the restricted area. He can’t finish through the contact that time, but these early post-ups are a perfect way to get him his touches and reward him for the effort.
The worry for the Portland coaching staff is Nurkic will regress on both ends if he’s not fed a steady diet of post touches. We’ve seen a litany of centers get pouty about a lack of post-ups; Dwight Howard’s effort level on defense is almost directly correlated with how many post touches he’s had in that game. It’s not an indictment of these guys — almost every player in the league benefits from getting the ball in his hands and feeling he’s a big part of the offense. There’s a reason coaches tell reporters “the ball has energy.”
Next: What do teams do with non-shooters like Justise Winslow?
Players across all positions do better on both ends of the floor when they’re involved offensively and get a chance to touch the ball. The only problem is that giving Nurkic and other centers their touches usually involves getting a really poor shot at the end of it, which is why centers are most maligned for complaining about not getting the ball. There is no easy solution here. The Trail Blazers need to keep throwing the ball to Nurkic and letting him have his touches, but perhaps a few small fixes in his game would help make those possessions at least slightly more efficient.