Ushering in a new era of Portland Trail Blazers basketball seems to be the theme of the 2015 NBA offseason. The Rip City roster no longer resembles the crew that had back-to-back 50-win seasons over the past two years, but one thing it can hang its hat on is that youth and potential have become the beacons of hope in an otherwise confusing time.
In a 15-part series, Oregon Sports News’ Bryant Knox and Jared Wright will be breaking down each player on the Trail Blazers roster. The series will conclude with an OSN Roundtable in October covering the state of the franchise entering the 2015-16 campaign.
Today, we take a look at the other lottery pick the Blazers drafted in 2012. While most folks following basketball (and some that don’t, due to his hip-hop hobby and national commercials) have heard of Damian Lillard, the young man previewed today is large, largely anonymous, and until last season, was a 7’1” punch line in Rip City.
(Stats courtesy of NBA.com and basketball-reference.com)
Where He’s Been
Meyers Leonard, for most of his three-year career in Portland, had been nailed to the bench by Portland coach Terry Stotts as he tried to transition from a young, raw big man to a legitimate basketball player.
As he learned his craft in the practice courts and gyms of Portland and Los Angeles (where he spent his summers getting grilled by the best players in the world, who migrate to LA every August), the Blazers themselves formed into a second-tier contender after Leonard’s rookie year. The need to stay competitive, and put your five best guys out there at all times, didn’t leave much time for a youngster in serious need of seasoning.
Other than sopping up garbage time minutes, filling in for injured backups, and getting suspended for fighting a fellow scrub at the end of a game Portland was winning handily, Blazermaniacs hadn’t seen much of Leonard, and since the team was good at the time, seeing Leonard get minutes was usually a bad thing.
How He Got Here
Leonard was the 11th overall pick in the 2012 Draft, drafted by Portland. The interesting thing about that Draft was that while Lillard obviously gets the most attention from that class except for Anthony Davis, the first overall pick, the sixth pick that Lillard was taken from wasn’t originally the Blazers’ pick.
Portland had finished close to that middle-of-the-pack, purgatory-like space in the standings in 2011-12, and they got the kind of late-lottery pick that typically might get you a decent starter, but is usually void of the star-level talents capable of transforming a franchise.
Thanks to the then-New Jersey Nets GM Billy King, kindly trading away a conditional first-round pick on March 15, 2012 to acquire Gerald Wallace, then the Nets being not bad enough to keep the pick, Portland had a very rare opportunity. Two lottery picks, especially in a draft that is shaping up to be one of the best drafts in a long time, was a chance to not only get some young talent onto a mostly veteran roster, but also to wash away the disappointment of seeing Brandon Roy and Greg Oden succumb to career-ending knee ailments.
After the Lillard pick, which everybody liked at the time (and LOVED later on), the next two picks were Harrison Barnes of the Golden State Warriors and Portland’s own Terrence Ross of the Toronto Raptors. Then, the Detroit Pistons picked ninth.
I was begging Joe Dumars, who was the Pistons’ GM at the time and had a history of incompetence, to somehow not pick the monster big man out of Connecticut, Andre Drummond. I wanted Drummond and Lillard to form the backbone for good Blazer teams until my forties. I wanted them to be the stars of the Blazer teams I could introduce my kids to, so they can grow up to be basketball fans, not rooting for a bunch of dirty birds playing in a league whose Shield isn’t gold because it’s the 50th Super Bowl, but whose Shield is yellow because everybody’s spent two years pissing on it.
Unfortunately, Dumars, in his last moment of intelligence, picked Drummond, and the Blazers got stuck with this raw, awkward-looking white guy. Tears may or may not have been shed.
What He Brings To The Table
In the interest of full disclosure, I (Jared Wright; we publish these under both our names, but the bulk of the writing for individual pieces is done by one of us) have to mention that since I started at Oregon Sports News, I’ve been crapping on Meyers Leonard’s abilities as a basketball player. This is the first of many salvos I fired at Meyers over the course of the season, and reading that article over again…Christ, I’m an idiot. If you take the time to read it as well, you’ll probably agree with me.
The things we largely wanted Meyers to do was show toughness in the post, rebound better, and show some kind of positive defensive ability. Well, he did show a little improvement rebounding, and his defense went from Lillard-bad to young big man-bad, but the one thing that led Portland to give up on Thomas Robinson, and make Leonard a part of the future, was the one skill everybody but the Blazers themselves had no clue he was developing: shooting.
Yeah, that’s right: Meyers Leonard not only broke out a new shooting stroke, but he…and it’s incredible to type this…he was good at it. Granted, it was in about 15 minutes per game over 55 games, and he only had 4.5 attempts per game, but the effect he had on defenses late in the season was unavoidable. Meyers Leonard was stretching the floor as a catch-and-shoot specialist, and it was glorious.
Leonard shot 51% from the field, 42% from three-point range, and 94% from the free-throw line in 2014-15. Digging a little deeper into his shooting numbers, those stats look less impressive than they seem: Leonard took a paltry 245 field goal attempts last year. There are many guys nowadays, including Lillard, that take more than 245 threes in a year, and a few make more than 245 threes. So yeah, it’s a small sample size that likely won’t translate to the same rate of accuracy as Leonard shoots more, and gets the defense’s attention more often.
The basic premise of Leonard as a stretch big man, however, remains sound. Even if he takes many more threes than the 112 he shot last season, he should still be very accurate from certain spots, like the corners; Leonard shot 15-for-26 on corner threes last year, and he plays for a coach in Stotts that has proven to be very creative at getting his players in spots where they can succeed.
A likely reason for his push to the perimeter is his weakness inside. Leonard shot a pathetic 7-for-16 on layups last year, showing a lack of strength that three NBA seasons, and three seasons on a professional’s diet and workout regimen, hasn’t yet rectified. He did shoot 9-for-10 on dunks, but we all knew he could jump and run. That’s all you need to be drafted by an NBA team as a seven-footer.
Leonard’s advanced numbers don’t tell much of a story, to be honest. He has a Net Rating of plus-1, and a Defensive Rating of 99.6. Leonard was mostly playing against backups and stretch bigs like himself, so those numbers are inflated somewhat. Playing only 847 minutes over 55 games was another factor.
His PER is very near the average of 15, at 14.8. While it’s true that PER does slightly favor big men, Meyers hasn’t played much like a big man during his NBA career. (Hence the frustrations guys like me were spouting all over the Blazers-themed blogospheres.)
So, to sum up: Meyers is a stretch big man who doesn’t bring much in the way of defense, is not strong enough to battle underneath for rebounds, and at 23 years of age is still young enough to get much better at the things he struggles at. He should get his chance to improve this year; time will be available with the departures of so many guys above him, and with the Blazers’ roster being as young and unseasoned as he himself is.
If you’re still questioning whether Meyers Leonard is important to the present and future fortunes of the Blazers, here’s one final stat for you: out of the 55 games Leonard played, in the 32 wins, he shot 52% from three-point range. In the 23 losses, he shot just 33% from beyond the arc.
Portland needs Leonard to sustain and build off his success from behind the three-point line, especially since most of the new guys Portland GM Neil Olshey brought in this summer can’t shoot a lick beyond 15 feet.
What To Expect
Expect Leonard to build off of the success of last year. His progress should be aided as he feels more secure in his place on the team after fans and bloggers (again, like me) were just ripping him apart earlier in his career. At one time, he even deleted his Twitter account just to escape the constant hate.
Lottery picks bust all the time, especially the double-digit picks, but three years into a career that’s comparable to a replacement player (Leonard’s posted a career .54 WAR, or Wins Above Replacement), Leonard has a chance to turn that around. He’ll get the chance to prove that he not only can have a long NBA career, but that he deserves to start alongside his All-Star draft mate.
He should get that chance to start; no other big man on Portland’s roster has anything close to the departed LaMarcus Aldridge’s shooting skill, nor the kind of shooting stroke that can create the space Stotts craves in his offensive sets. Starting Ed Davis and Chris Kaman together would be an offense-killer, and might inspire Damian Lillard to either chuck contested shots all night or start drinking.
Look for Leonard to shoot more, and shoot with increased attention from the defense. If he shows improvement on defense, where his speed should let him contain all but the fastest ball-handlers on screen plays and get back to his original assignment, that will all but guarantee him a starting spot not just this season, but in future seasons as the Trail Blazers continue the rebuilding phase.
(Note: I refuse to call rebuilding a “process,” not with the mess currently going on with the Philadelphia 76ers. The team uses “process” to describe what they’re doing so often, the team’s bloggers and fans have adopted the hash tag #TrustTheProcess, and even have it on T-shirts and such.
Allow me to vomit into the nearest blue-and-red colored receptacle.)
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