With 28 games remaining on their schedule, the Portland Trail Blazers sit at .500 (27-27) and are light years ahead of where they were expected to be after GM Neil Olshey gutted the roster in the offseason in favor of a youth movement.
Less than a season into Olshey’s 3-5 year plan, fans in the Portland area are already pushing the panic button. If you thought that nearly 40 years without a championship team would build patience, you’d be mistaken. If anything, the NBA’s growing instant gratification culture has only encouraged Rose City residents to panic even faster when the team gets farther away from winning the draft lottery, without being ready to emerge as a top-5 team.
It’s known as NBA purgatory, and there’s nothing the casual fan hates more, but that shouldn’t be any reason at all to make Olshey think a move needs to be made when his team is potentially producing a playoff season well ahead of schedule.
Some fans are hoping for a blockbuster trade, but it’s rare that a superstar is dealt for peanuts, and that’s what Portland would have to offer a trade partner without mortgaging their future by parting with a budding star or a high draft pick.
Trades just don’t solve everything, even if that’s the popular opinion. The issue behind the team’s struggles are perhaps a little more simplistic than most realize, and a trade isn’t likely to solve the problem overnight without making the situation worse in the long run.
Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum are putting up all-star worthy numbers after concerns that they couldn’t or wouldn’t gel on the court together. What occurred instead is that Portland has two of the best young guards in the league, and one of them at a major discount for the time being.
Allen Crabbe has looked great as a sixth man and has flashed the potential to be a starter down the road, while the defense of Al-Faroq Aminu has been solid in place of Nic Batum, who was traded to Charlotte in June.
Portland is 14th in field goal percentage, 12th in three point percentage, and 10th in points per game at 102.5, while allowing 101.9 points per game. Think of where they could be and the pressure they could put on their opponents if they made just two or three more foul shots per game?
They currently make just 73% of their free throws, 25th out of 30 in the NBA. They are also 25th in free throw attempts per game, which means they are not only failing to consistently get to the charity stripe, but when they do they don’t consistently take care of business, hitting shots less than three quarters of the time. Portland averages 21.6 foul line shots per game, and only make 73%, that averages out to roughly 7 shots at 7 points per game they are leaving on the court.
New York leads the league with free throw shooting percentage of .808, if Portland could creep closer to that mark and get to the foul line more often, they could overcome their defensive struggles just by being a more efficient offensive team.
Damian Lillard is shooting on average three more times per game than his first three years in the NBA and that has dropped his field goal percentage to 42%, but his points per game are up three points over last season, so the uptick in attempts is producing more points, even if it’s not the most efficient method. Lillard hits 86% of his free throws, so he’s clearly not the issue with bricks at the line.
CJ McCollum is shooting 44% from the field and averaging 20.7 points per game, while shooting 79% from the line. For a guy that hits nearly half of his shots from the field and nearly 40% from beyond the arc, he could stand to hit a few more when it’s just him versus the basket.
Aminu is where the trend starts going down with the starters, as he hits just 40% of his field goals and a meager 70% from the line. 70% from your starting small forward is scary, but they can work on it. When Crabbe comes off the bench, he hits 48% of his shots from the field and 87% from the line. Even Meyers Leonard is not the liability many make him out to be, as he hits 44% from the field, and 75% from the line.
The odd man out here would be Mason Plumlee, and while he has a great field goal percentage at 51%, he hits just 62% of his shots from the line.
Of all qualified centers, Plumlee hits more free throws than just 5 of them. Enes Kanter, the man Portland wanted to man the middle once it was apparent the youth movement would be taking place, is hitting 56% of his shots from the field and 78% from the line.
While a trade involving LA Clippers forward Blake Griffin has gained momentum on social media, Griffin is a career 66% FT shooter and would not solve the team’s major issue, as it would likely relegate Leonard to the bench and hurt the Blazers’ free throw shooting even more. While it would be safe to assume that Griffin would score more points from the field than Leonard, there is a pretty good chance that those points will also come away from Lillard and McCollum, and leaving little reason to believe that the team would just start scoring more points than they already are.
Cleveland forward Kevin Love, another popular trade target for Portland, is a career 81% shooter from the foul line, and is averaging 15 points per game this season on 42% shooting. Love wouldn’t be a bad addition but while the Griffin trade nearly promises a lottery pick this summer as he is out with the hand injury and the team would likely drop out of the playoff race essentially down two starters in the home stretch, the Love addition likely means losing a premium asset and not dropping enough in the standings to get another premium asset in return. So unless you believe that Portland could one day be elite while starting Crabbe at the two and bringing in Love to start at the 4, this trade isn’t good for the future.
Both Love and Griffin would also add age to a young core, but neither provides a defensive presence, so unless the Griffin deal results in a high draft pick for a talented two way player, it’s not likely to make the Blazers an elite competitor in the next couple of seasons.
Everyone else you could mention as a potential front court trade target (Pau Gasol, Marc Gasol, Al Horford, Joakim Noah, Roy Hibbert, or Dwight Howard) to replace or play alongside Plumlee is already on the wrong side of 30 or rapidly approaching it which would leave the team in a bind for a skilled center during the peak of Lillard’s prime years. So why gamble the future for the present when we are left to assume this team still has room to grow into a contender?
Even if the Love or Griffin trades were likely to happen (they are not), they don’t guarantee to help Portland become a contender, or they at least leave reason to believe they won’t while also limiting their assets in the short and long terms.
The obvious move here is to do nothing. Unless teams are calling looking to trade picks or quality players in exchange for Aminu, Noah Vonleh, or Ed Davis, I say you put the phone on silent and watch the other 29 teams go bananas trying to keep pace with Golden State and San Antonio this season, both of which are a good couple of years ahead of where Portland is trying to get.
Being .500 and in the 7th seed is not the end of the world (far from it, for reasonable folks), and shows that this young team is capable of far more than many thought. This team is essentially where the Golden State Warriors were before adding Draymond Green and Andre Iguodala to the roster, so if they keep their core together and add a couple of future stars, the sky’s the limit against an NBA full of aging veteran stars.
While I would advocate for Portland to make no moves today, I would like to see them make a serious push for Larry Sanders, a 27 year old veteran center and an unrestricted free agent with no current NBA team to call home.
Portland doesn’t have expandable trade assets but what they do have is lots of expendable cap room. While Sanders would not help the Blazers’ free throw shooting (his career average would actually lower Portland’s current percentages), he would provide some essential stops once he has time to get into game shape. Sanders’ offensive game needs work, but his scoring production is in line with what Plumlee or Leonard currently offers and the bonus is that Sanders would bring instant credibility to Portland’s defense as a qualified rim protector.
While all of the potential trades leave Portland’s cupboard a bit more bare than it already is, not making a trade while seeking the addition of Sanders working within a Plumlee-Leonard-Aminu-Crabbe front court rotation could be great in the coming years, especially as Lillard and McCollum continue to develop in the backcourt and the team ideally brings in another couple of highly touted rookies. And who knows, maybe the talent in Portland will even get them as far as to land a highly sought after free agent in the coming years. You never know.
It’s rarely if ever true, but the best option to build a better tomorrow appears to be sitting idle today while giving your team an honest chance to grow and gel organically. That may sound boring, but I’ve heard San Antonio called boring since 1999, and I’d wager that six NBA Finals and five championships over 16 seasons weren’t very boring to the fans down in south-central Texas.
Don’t make a move today, Neil. We can’t get back the 1984 draft, or the 2007 draft, we can’t even get back the summer of 2015. All we can worry about is today, and today we can get it right, and give this young team the chance it deserves to show the basketball world what they are made of.
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