NBA Season Preview 2019-20: The one reason to watch each and every team

Portland Trail Blazers: How Hassan Whiteside and Zach Collins fill in for Jusuf Nurkic

Over the last five seasons or so, no team has been as stubborn about bashing its head against its ceiling year after year as the Portland Trail Blazers. They’ve continually proven their detractors wrong, of course, defying annual win projections, making the playoffs every season and even peaking last year with a conference finals appearance.

With that being said, their doubters have still largely been correct: They haven’t been a legitimate threat to win it all, the Warriors have owned them in each and every playoff meeting (even without KD) and they lack the flexibility to really do anything about it, shy of a game-changing CJ McCollum trade that’s never going to happen.

However, that hasn’t stopped Rip City’s supporters from wondering whether a healthy Jusuf Nurkic could help them barrel through this team’s glass ceiling, since he went down in March with a serious leg injury. Before he can return, however, the Blazers will be relying on Hassan Whiteside and Zach Collins to fill the void.

Damian Lillard and McCollum are the most entertaining players on the team, but we’ve seen their backcourt show on repeat for the last four years. We know what they are. What we don’t know is how a volatile personality like Whiteside will fit in while trying to salvage his old-school big man skill-set in the modern NBA, and what the next step might look like for a promising but flawed stretch-big like Collins. In 2019-20, we’ll get answers to both questions.