Portland Trail Blazers | Pace and Space

The 2023 Portland Trail Blazers: Overrated?

November 12, 2022 - by Fox Doucette

Through games of November 11, the Portland Trail Blazers are 9-3, second in the Western Conference behind only the 10-3 Utah Jazz. They’ve beaten the 8-4 Phoenix Suns twice. The team has the fifth-best defense in the league powering their early surge. But on the other hand, the Washington Wizards started last year 10-3 and fell off a cliff. Washington, whose advanced stats didn’t present as a 10-3 team, ended up dropping all the way to 35-47 and landed 12th in the East. Portland’s advanced stats look awfully similar at this point in the season. So are they headed off …

Analysis

The Portland Trail Blazers Worst Season: 1972

October 13, 2022 - by Fox Doucette

The Portland Trail Blazers, in 2022, posted their worst season in 16 years, going just 27-55. They head into the 2023 season hoping to rebuild quickly enough to get Damian Lillard one last chance at a deep playoff and possible title run. It may not (probably will not) happen this year, but hope springs eternal. That “worst season in 16 years” means 2006, a year Portland went 21-61. That year tied for the second-worst mark in team history and represented the worst record in 33 years, going all the way back to 1973 and their third year in existence. Now …

Analysis

When “3s And Layups” Goes Wrong

March 12, 2022 - by Fox Doucette - 1 Comment

Critics of NBA aesthetics often say that the league has degenerated into a dumbed-down version of basketball where the only thing that matter are “3s and Layups”. And to a degree, they’re right—add in free throws to the mix and you’ve got the essentials of efficient basketball, which can be statistically measured and which have time and again borne out that those elements are the best way to score points. And since you can’t win if you don’t score more points than your opponent (duh), it stands to reason you want to maximize your efficiency. Granted, the critics of aesthetics …

Analysis

The Portland Trail Blazers’ Best Season: 1977

October 14, 2021 - by Fox Doucette

The Portland Trail Blazers, since 1977, have missed the playoffs just eight times. They were just two wins away from making three straight NBA Finals between 1990 and 1992, losing to Magic Johnson and the Lakers in six games in the Western Conference Finals in 1991. Other than a lost decade between 2004 and 2013 that featured just three playoff appearances sandwiched with a five-year playoff absence before 2009 and a two-year drought after 2011, the only year they missed the playoffs was 1982. “Since 1977” is the key to all of this. Portland missed the playoffs in each of …

Analysis

The Great Portland Trail Blazers Postmortem 2021

June 4, 2021 - by Fox Doucette

The Portland Trail Blazers have been an object of fascination for this here site ever since they got off to a spectacular 28-18 start despite at that point in the season having a negative Net Rating from having gotten their butts kicked by 20 points or more on seven separate occasions while having just two wins of that margin to their name. They seemed to spit in the face of the logic that great teams win big and lose close, and at the time I predicted that it would come back to bite them hard in the playoffs. And sure …

Editorial

A Wild 2021 Finish Brews in the Western Conference

May 3, 2021May 3, 2021 - by Fox Doucette

Through games of May 2, the Western Conference features a three-way tie at 36-28 for the 5 seed with just eight games to go in the regular season. And as alluded to in last week’s “6 is the New 8”, this is a fantastic year to have such a three-car pileup on the NBA standings highway. Most of the time, when you get a tie across a bunch of mid-seeds, it’s just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as all that hangs in the balance is who gets to host whom in what ultimately meaningless Game 1 of a …

Editorial

Portland’s Painful Regression Has Begun

April 25, 2021 - by Fox Doucette

See? I told you so. A few weeks back (April 6, to be exact), I pointed out that the Portland Trail Blazers had a won-lost record that seemed not at all to correlate with the points scored and allowed in their actual games. They were a slightly sub-.500 team posting wins like a squad that wins 50 games in a normal 82-game season. Since I said that (early enough in the day that they hadn’t yet played the Los Angeles Clippers that night), Portland is 2-8. And what’s more, four of those losses, including the last three in a row, …

Analysis

The Portland Trail Blazers: 2021’s Best Bad NBA Team

April 6, 2021April 7, 2021 - by Fox Doucette

The Portland Trail Blazers beat the Oklahoma City Thunder 133-85 on April 3, running their record to 30-19, sixth in the stacked Western Conference. They also ran their season Net Rating above the zero point, a place they’ve found themselves only rarely during the season. The previous two remarks, on paper, would seem to contradict each other. After all, one of the most powerful predictive factors in a team’s season record is their point differential, whether it’s per game or per 100 possessions—since the Blazers play at a 98.3 pace, those two numbers are close enough to tell the same …

Is He Any Good

Bill Walton: Was He Any Good?

August 6, 2020 - by Fox Doucette - 1 Comment

In the first article in this series looking back at historical NBA players and whether their impact matched their reputation, the central question revolved around whether only six years’ worth of NBA games in a career was enough to qualify someone for the Hall of Fame, no matter how good those six years’ worth of games actually were. And in Yao Ming‘s case, the verdict was ultimately Confirmed; he was and remains a true Hall of Famer. But Bill Walton adds another wrinkle to this question. The man’s career was so plagued by injury that he made only two All-Star …

Is He Any Good

Rasheed Wallace: Was He Any Good?

July 27, 2020July 28, 2020 - by Fox Doucette

“Ball don’t lie” is the guiding principle for every single thing I write for this site. From statistical analysis to comparing teams within and across eras to this very series you’re reading right now, the only thing that ultimately matters is what happened on the court, as measured and counted by the tools we have available to determine not just who won or lost and by how much, but how and why each player on the court contributed toward or actively hindered his team’s efforts. “Ball don’t lie”, of course, has another name around here: “Sheed’s Law”, after Rasheed Wallace. …