Portland Trail Blazers: 3 takeaways from Game 3 vs. Pelicans
3. This is not a series for Jusuf Nurkic
Jusuf Nurkic finished Game 3 with five points and seven rebounds on 2-of-7 shooting, and if the raw numbers weren’t damning enough, a look into how the Blazers have been outscored with him on the court in this series makes it even worse.
In Game 3, Nurkic’s -18 plus/minus certainly wasn’t the worst on the team, but it might have been the most revealing when you consider it came in only 20 minutes. In Game 2, he was a -6 in 15 minutes, and in the postseason opener, he was a -7 in 25 minutes.
Hey Jrue Holiday, who’s the biggest liability on the floor for the Blazers right now?
Jrue Holiday really pointed at Nurkic. pic.twitter.com/jx6iAgWdc3
— Ball Don’t Lie (@Balldontlie) April 20, 2018
Sure, individual game plus/minus can be misleading, but his Net Rating in a three-game sample does not lie: This team gives him major problems on both ends. The Blazers have posted a disastrous -23.2 Net Rating with him on the floor in this series, the worst mark on the entire roster.
Against a versatile, spread frontcourt like Nikola Mirotic and Anthony Davis, Portland has had to pick its poison and chug it continuously for every second Nurkic has been on the floor. Put the Bosnian Beast on Mirotic, and the Pelicans can open up the floor by drawing him away from the basket where he has little chance of stopping Threekola on pick-and-pops.
Switch him onto AD and the speed disadvantage gets even worse, with the Brow capable of taking Nurkic off the dribble or draining shots in more pick-and-pops. The only way to counteract these problems was for Nurkic to go off on the offensive end, hopefully getting one of them in foul trouble. That hasn’t happened, with Mirotic holding his own on the defensive end.
Facing a 3-0 hole, it’s desperation time. It’s time to experiment and try something crazy. As much as it hurts to lose your third-best offensive player, the Blazers have no choice. This is just an awful matchup for Nurkic, so it might be time for head coach Terry Stotts to resort to a small-ball starting lineup and change the equation, even at the risk of getting out-muscled down low.