NBA: Ranking 30 best power forwards for 2019-20

While it’s likely the Portland Trail Blazers had gone as far as the forward tandem of Al-Farouq Aminu and Maurice Harkless was going to allow by reaching the Western Conference Finals last season, the Blazers may take a step back in 2019-20 without them.

In particular, Portland appears to be looking to go big at the 4 moving into this season after playing Aminu, a converted 3, at the spot for most of the last four seasons.

Zach Collins, who will be 22 in November, is a 7-footer looking to transition into a full-time stretch 4 as he made incremental improvements in 2018-19, his second NBA season.

Collins made all 77 of his appearances off the bench — his one career start was in December 2017 as a rookie — and averaged 6.6 points and 4.2 rebounds in 17.6 minutes per game while shooting 47.3 percent overall and hitting 33.1 percent on 121 3-point attempts.

That was a marked improvement from his 39.8 and 31.0 percent splits as a rookie and Collins also averaged 2.4 blocks per 36-minutes (insert warning about per-36 minutes numbers on guys who average less than 20 here) last season.

Where he made the most rapid improvement as a shooter was in the paint away from the rim, where he made 50.8 percent of his attempts from three to 10 feet after converting a woeful 31.8 percent of those as a rookie.

His playoff numbers were almost identical to those from the regular season — 6.8 points, 3.6 boards in 17.2 minutes on 50.6 percent and 33.3 percent shooting.

But the cause for alarm for Blazers fans — Portland was 6.2 points better per 100 possessions when Collins was a spectator. Ouch.

Still, Collins at the 4 will cause some matchup issues for teams that go smaller there and that is something Terry Stotts will be able to exploit. Not that, you know, it won’t be CJ McCollum and Damian Lillard doing the lion’s share of the scoring anyway.