With the regular season now at an end for the Portland Trail Blazers, it’s time for the most cliché thing a blowhard with a keyboard like me can think of: Player Grades!
We did the five players that played the most minutes per game this season yesterday. Today, we grade the performances of the rest of the players that played at least 10 minutes per game this season.
This requirement does disqualify rarely-used bench players (such as Brian Roberts) and veterans there to dispense wisdom (Air Sasquatch). Since those guys didn’t have much time on the court, it’d be fair to grade them all as “Incomplete.” With the limited data available, it wouldn’t be fair to assign an arbitrary letter to them.
That said, let’s press onward! Stats courtesy of NBA.com and basketball-reference.com.
Meyers Leonard, Power Forward/Center
Season Stats: 61 G, 10 Starts, 21.8 MPG, 8.4 PPG, 5.1 RPG, 1.5 APG, 45/38/76 shooting splits, 2.1 Win Shares, 11.3 PER
Thoughts: Meyers was shut down about a month ago, and the season he was having was a slightly mixed bag. On the one hand, he’s set career highs in minutes, scoring, and rebounding. On the other hand, that’s because he had significant minutes, and the highs came with a predictable, but slightly alarming, dip in efficiency.
Damian Lillard, by comparison, increased his production on a scale similar to Leonard, yet stayed reasonably efficient even as the focal point of the defense. Leonard, meanwhile, routinely had good looks, yet had a habit of missing them. It got to the point where I was literally yelling at the TV, telling the big guy to shoot, because I knew his confidence was shot. Especially after hurting his shoulder the first time.
His shoulder problems must have lingered for most of the year; it could help explain the dip in his three-point accuracy beyond having nearly twice as many attempts as last year. I’m sure his agent will try to point that out to GM Neil Olshey during Leonard’s restricted free agency this summer.
As to whether they retain Meyers, or if the Blazers even want to…we have all summer to talk about that. For now, I have to judge his season. Losing his starting job to Noah Vonleh, and seeing his minutes dip as well, does ding his grade.
Despite his still-good three-point shooting mark, there was nothing else of consequence that Leonard contributed. His defense was still pretty bad (a reason why he lost his starting job), his rebounding was never good and still isn’t, and he’s played a little soft, even for a big man asked to space the floor.
Grade: C
Ed Davis, Power Forward/Center
Season Stats: 81 G, 0 starts, 20.8 MPG, 6.5 PPG, 7.4 RPG, 1.1 APG, 61% FG%, 58% FT%, 6.7 Win Shares, 18.8 PER
Thoughts: The steal of the 2015 free agency class, in this man’s humble opinion. Davis does the gritty, thankless work under the hoop, and busts his ass every night out there. As hard as he plays, it’s amazing that he has missed only one game this season.
Ed is only .3 rebounds behind Mason Plumlee for the team lead, despite playing five fewer minutes a game; Davis does have more offensive rebounds, at almost three a game. He doesn’t score besides putbacks, dunks, and the very occasional free throw, but every team needs a muckraker out there. They can’t all be the leading man, and Davis realizes this.
One thing I want to point out is the Win Shares. That stat is the estimate of the number of wins a player contributed to his team. Other than his field-goal shooting, Davis’ traditional stats aren’t all that sexy, unless you love offensive rebounding. Those Win Shares, though, should open up some eyes. For reference, CJ McCollum had 5.9 Win Shares this season.
That means that Ed Davis was responsible for more wins this Trail Blazers season than CJ McCollum. Let that sink in for a moment.
Combined with his above-average PER, Davis is an advanced stats darling to the likes of me, and extremely valuable to his teammates. And they know it. Hopefully, this helps more folks out there realize that Ed Davis is a freaking treasure.
Grade: A+
Gerald Henderson, Shooting Guard
Season Stats: 72 G, 0 Starts, 19.9 MPG, 8.7 PPG, 2.9 RPG, 1 APG, 44/35/77 shooting splits, 2 Win Shares, 12.9 PER
Thoughts: Let’s be real here. The first half of the season, Gerald Henderson sucked. I can’t put that more plainly.
He had a hip injury in training camp that opened the door for McCollum. As we all know by now, McCollum shot through that door, blew up the doorway with a pound of C4, and hasn’t looked back. Hendo was relegated to the bench, and it was obvious he was still in some pain from that hip. Some wounded pride may have been a factor as well; he had been a starter for most of his career in Charlotte, where he spent all his NBA service before being traded to Portland in the Nicolas Batum deal.
Henderson will never be a good three-point shooter, and guards that can’t consistently nail threes are about as welcome as dog vomit in coach Terry Stotts’ world. That 35% represents his career high, and unless he takes a page from Vince Carter’s book, that percentage will be as high as it’ll go.
However, after the All-Star break, Hendo rediscovered his crafty midrange game; he’s always been a solid midrange shooter, and can break a defense down in a pinch. His hot streak after the Blazers got back from break helped key the surge that got Portland into the playoffs at the fifth seed, and he must get credit for that.
He won’t ever start for Stotts, not while McCollum and Allen Crabbe are healthy, but he has value as a bench guy here. If he can accept that (remember, he started 292 games for the Hornets/Bobcats in six years), he’ll be better off for it.
Other than that hot stretch I mentioned, Hendo didn’t do all that much other than sop up minutes and provide some veteran know-how that’s much needed for a team this young. His season has been one big meh. Here’s hoping he has a better season next year, as well as a good showing in the playoffs.
Grade: C
Maurice Harkless, Forward
Season Stats: 78 G, 13 Starts, 18.7 MPG, 6.4 PPG, 3.6 RPG, 0.9 APG, 47/28/62 shooting splits, 2.9 Win Shares, 13.4 PER
Thoughts: Let’s give props to Mo here for playing power forward in the starting lineup, and for being a part of one of three lineups in the NBA that’s maintained a 15 Net Rating over 250 minutes of action at least. The other two are the starting lineups of the Golden State Warriors, who just set the NBA record for single-season wins with 73, and the Oklahoma City Thunder, which features two of the NBA’s five best players.
That’s pretty good. (Hat tip to the Blazers TV team for that little nugget.)
Individually, Harkless has had a poorer year than he wanted, especially going into restricted free agency. His three-point shooting has gone totally into the poop shoot, his free throw shooting is barely better than Plumlee’s or Davis’, he can’t pass (just 66 assists on the year), and before Leonard got hurt, he was struggling for minutes behind Al-Farouq Aminu.
It’s good that he’s bit the bullet and been willing to play the 4, because he won’t have much else in this year to point towards as a success. I’m sure his people will tout the fact that the Blazers destroyed teams with him in the starting lineup, but 250 minutes is a small sample size. And Olshey is smart enough to be wary of small sample sizes.
But that’s a discussion for another day. For this season, Mo gets a failing grade. I just can’t pass over that sub-30% three-point shooting for a perimeter player in Stotts’ system, I’m sorry.
Grade: D
Noah Vonleh, Power Forward
Season Stats: 78 G, 56 Starts, 15 MPG, 3.6 PPG, 3.9 RPG, 42% FG%, 74% FT%, 1.2 Win Shares, 8.7 PER
Thoughts: Vonleh had a rookie Nic Batum kind of year. He started, played a bit, than gave way to the bench guy that was more experienced than he was.
Whether Vonleh eventually becomes the kind of player Batum is anyone’s guess; that might have been what Olshey was banking on when he made that deal. Vonleh was the real prize of that package.
He was allowed a natural flow to his play. He took threes, he leveraged his athleticism when he could, he made mistakes, and he did a great deal of watching and learning. If the Blazers hadn’t been about a total youth movement in the first place, Vonleh might have spent time in the D-League. As it is, his playing those 15 minutes a game didn’t hurt Portland too badly; things always seemed to pick up, or the ship seemed to be righted, when Ed Davis came into the game for Vonleh.
Judging from the point of view that Noah did have a rookie-Batum year, I’ll just call it average. He didn’t make a big impact, but he never was put in a position where he HAD to. For a 20-year-old kid, that is all you can really do.
(So don’t whine to me about Noah’s grade being higher than Harkless’. More was expected of Mo than from the kid.)
Grade: C
That’ll do it for Player Grades. Tomorrow, I cap off my week of hell by breaking down the upcoming playoff series between our Blazers and the Los Angeles Clippers, complete with schedule (I hope).
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