Portland Trail Blazers: 5 Observations From The Past Week (Jan. 3-9)
By Kevin Dolan
Here are five thoughts on the Portland Trail Blazers’ past week, including Mason Plumlee’s arms, C.J. McCollum’s DNP and Allen Crabbe’s affinity for midrange jumpers.
1. It remains to be seen whether or not the Portland Trail Blazers are capable of playing good defense with both Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum on the floor. Portland has allowed 104.7 points per 100 possessions with those two on the court and 105.5 as a team.
Both guys are definitely helping their team, but it’s really hard to guard opposing wings when you’re starting two guys who have point guard size and aren’t even clear positives (or a clear negative in Lillard’s case) when defending point guards.
Klay Thompson is a tough matchup for most teams but he had a field day against the Blazers Friday night as he was able to shoot over the top of McCollum, Lillard, Allen Crabbe or whoever else the Blazers threw at him. He finished with 36 points on 22 shots and it’s tough to see a way for the Blazers to get a lot better defending big 2s like Klay outside of an unexpected growth spurt in the backcourt.
2. Mason Plumlee has really short arms for a 5 (6’11″ wingspan) and he’s been abused by bigger, longer 5s the last couple games. DeAndre Jordan (7’6″ wingspan) was getting offensive rebounds and dunks whenever he wanted.
Meanwhile, Andrew Bogut (7’3 wingspan) gave him fits on both ends of the floor.
Those are two of the better centers in the league but he can’t draw them away from the paint (Noah Vonleh has no space to operate here)
or provide good rim protection. Plumlee does a lot of nice things when he’s on the court — rim-running, facilitating from the high post, offensive rebounding — but playing a below-average rim protector (opponents are shooting 56.6 percent at the rim against Plumlee, via Nylon Calculus) who doesn’t have shooting range and isn’t a dynamic scorer might not be viable long-term.
3. Al-Farouq Aminu is shooting the ball really confidently lately.
He’s shooting 9.4 three-pointers per 100 possessions so far in January (up from 7.0 in December and 7.2 in November) and is making 42.1 percent of those three-point attempts. The Trail Blazers have been +5.6 points per 100 possessions better when he’s on the court this season and that is likely to improve if he keeps shooting a good percentage on 9+ attempts per 100 possessions if defenders have to start staying closer to him off the ball.
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The offense has already been good with Aminu on the floor (104.8 points per 100 possessions with him on the floor, 99.9 with him off the floor) and should only get better as defenders start to respect Aminu’s jumper more, spacing the floor and opening up driving lanes for Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum.
4. McCollum not being allowed to play in Wednesday’s game against the Los Angeles Clippers due to a clerical error on the active/inactive list before the game is one of the strangest things I’ve heard of in a while. It was funny because it was so random and pointless but it’s frustrating that the league officials weren’t able to show some flexibility with arbitrary rules about submitted rosters.
Doc Rivers deserves credit for giving his team a better chance to win but the league should be able to recognize a silly error and allow the best players to get on the court. This probably won’t ever happen again but there’s no reason the league should hurt the product they’re putting on the court because somebody circled something wrong on a roster sheet. This is basketball not the SATs.
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5. Allen Crabbe is now shooting 48 percent from midrange and 52 percent in the non-restricted area of the paint this season. Those numbers are way above league-average and his numbers from last year (5-of-30 from midrange). He’s good at those shots but he’s shooting a ton of shots from there (143 midrange attempts, 144 three-point attempts).
However, we should not he’ll probably regress back to the mean at some point in the future.