Portland Trail Blazers: 5 keys to making the playoffs in 2017-18

5. Stay healthy

While this is certainly the most important of the five keys, this is a given for any individual or team in sports, so I decided to just get it out of the way and not make you wait until the last slide to read about it.

That being said, there’s really only one player on the Portland Trail Blazers that everyone hopes to see stay healthy this year, and that’s Jusuf Nurkic. As HoopsHabit’s esteemed Editor-in-Chief, Gerald Bourguet, wrote recently: “we can’t gloss over Nurkic missing 20 games, 60 games and then another 17 games through the first three years of his career.”

Rip City was clearly a much more formidable team with Nurkic on the roster. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the Portland Trail Blazers cannot afford to have any weak links in their starting lineup if they want to compete in the West.