The Portland Trail Blazers will have to step up their game in the post-All-Star break run of their schedule.
The Portland Trail Blazers, along with the rest of the NBA, are currently in the midst of a week-long break from competition. The break made room for this weekend’s All-Star festivities. However, it also allowed players across the league to rest up before enduring the home stretch of the season.
Everyone will hit the ground running once play resumes on Thursday and Friday. The Blazers are no exception to this. They currently sit seventh in the Western Conference with a 32-26 record and will have 24 games to fight for better seeding.
Fortunately, Portland is a franchise that has performed well after the All-Star break. They went 18-8 after last year’s festivities to close the season and haven’t posted a record below .500 after the break since 2012-13. The team went 8-21 to close out that season.
However, their upcoming schedule won’t make it easy to replicate their customary second half success. Of the 19 teams they’ll face, 12 are above .500. Sixteen of their 24 games will be against opponents above .500. They hold a 20-18 record against the field, having played all of them at least once earlier in the season.
Damian Lillard will be called upon to spearhead the Blazers’ charge and he is getting hot at the right time. He ended the first half of the season with 50-point, 39-point and 44-point performances, marking the highest-scoring three-game stretch in franchise history.
Lillard followed that up with a great performance off the bench for Team Steph in Sunday’s NBA All-Star Game. The team lost 148-145 to Team LeBron, but he finished the evening with 21 points, three rebounds and two assists. He played so well that he received a share of the fan vote for All-Star Game MVP.
The Blazers are surely hoping the good times continue to roll when the second half gets underway. It was around this time last season that Lillard began to kick things into a higher gear, leading the team from 10 games below .500 to a 41-41 record and a playoff berth.
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Lillard averaged 29.7 points per game and shot 41.3 percent from 3-point range post-break in 2016-17. He scored 30 points or more 11 times over that span, punctuating his final game of the regular season with a franchise-high 59-point outburst.
But much like last season, Jusuf Nurkic will be the X-factor for the Blazers’ second half. In 2016-17, Nurkic had freshly arrived in Rip City after acquiring him from the Denver Nuggets in a Feb. 13, 2017 trade. Nurkic averaged 15.3 points, 10.5 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game in the 19 games he played post-All-Star break.
His output was particularly impressive because he accomplished it while being out of shape and only knowing a limited amount of the team’s playbook. Unfortunately, a non-displaced right leg fracture sidelined him at the end of March. He missed the remaining seven games of the season and three of the team’s four first round playoff games against the Golden State Warriors.
Nurkic has been a bit more inconsistent in 2017-18, averaging 14.1 points and 8.2 rebounds per game and shooting 48.0 percent from the field. It’s very important for him to step up his production in the second half of the season. As a solid rim protector and inside scorer, his success allows Lillard and C.J. McCollum to flourish on both sides of the ball.
The Portland Trail Blazers are about to endure a tough stretch of games to close out the 2017-18 season. Precedent indicates that they will play well, so there is room for optimism in Blazer Nation, but the team won’t make any noise in the Western Conference standings unless Damian Lillard and Jusuf Nurkic perform at a high level.
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We’ll see what tone the team sets when the final portion of their season commences on Friday, Feb. 23 against the Utah Jazz.