Portland Trail Blazers: 5 big goals for 2018-19 NBA season

5. Stay healthy

Good health is a key goal for any professional sports franchise. Unfortunately, it’s way easier to say you want your players to be healthy all season than it is to actually pull off the feat. Part of Portland’s success during the regular season can be attributed to staying in good shape for most of the year. Seven Blazers played at least 70 games in 2017-18.

However, there were some bumps and bruises for key players along the way. Most notably, Maurice Harkless sat out 12 of the final 20 regular season games with left knee issues. He had to have arthroscopic surgery to fix the problem.

Additionally, Damian Lillard missed seven games in the middle of the year due to a strained right calf. Al-Farouq Aminu‘s season got off to a rocky start when he missed 13 games due to a sprained right ankle. Other than that, most of the Blazers were accounted for on a nightly basis.

Portland would assuredly like to be just as healthy in 2018-19. It is especially important to do so in what will certainly be a hyper-competitive Western Conference. An injury-induced losing streak, even a small one, would likely set the team back in the playoff race. Ultimately, it will take sound training regimens and a little luck to keep Blazers players off the inactive list this year.