BAKE THE BLAZERS
-VS-
Game Time Start: 10:00 PM ET
Where: Rose Garden, Portland, OR
Officials: D. Stafford, D. Collins, M. Lindsay
Media Notes: Indiana Notes, Portland Notes
Television: FOX Sports Indiana / Comcast SportsNet Portland
Radio: WFNI 1070 AM / KXTG 750 AM, KPOJ 620 AM
NBA Feeds:
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PACERS Danny Granger - left knee tendinosis (out) BLAZERS Damian Lillard - hamstring (probable) Sasha Pavlovic - left foot (doubtful) Elliot Williams - left Achilles tendon (out) |
Jared Wade: Pacers Edge Out a One-Point Win in Memphis During his 12-year NBA career, Zach Randolph has made it abundantly clear on a number of occasions that he's not scared of anybody on the basketball court. The 6-foot-9, 260- pound Memphis Grizzlies power forward has gone toe-to-toe with some of the league's biggest and baddest dudes over the years, including, most recently, Oklahoma City Thunder center Kendrick Perkins; their November clash resulted in ejections, a $25,000 fine for Randolph and one of the season's great quotes: Z-Bo telling Memphis radio host Chris Vernon, "I'm good with these hands, man. I'm a jackin' dude." (There's also the off -court and past stuff, which only bolster Z-Bo's never-scared bona fides.) How about them Pacers? This one-point win in Memphis on MLK Day tied them with Miami for the most wins in the Eastern Conference (26). They remain in third, behind Miami and New York, since they have more losses, but this looks to be a completely different team from the one we saw early in the season. This win was impressive for several reasons. I shall list a few. 1) It was a very balanced attack. Nobody scored more than 14 points but six players had at least eight in what had to be one of the slowest-paced NBA games this season. (It was an estimated 85 possessions, according to Hoop Data.) Normally, in wins, the team has leaned heavily on either Paul George or David West, with the occasional late-game heroics of George Hill. This game was a much more varied mix of contributions with a steady diet of team defense. 2) They played up to the moment. Indiana went to Memphis to play a early game on MLK Day in the town where Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. Aside from the postseason and All-Star Weekend, the two biggest dates on the NBA calendar are Christmas and MLK Day. Before the game, players are asked big questions about civil rights and their place in history. It may seem a little canned after watching similar scenes play out each year, but it has to feel larger than the average game. On the court, this game also felt meaningful. It was a playoff-level atmosphere and a game that the Grizzlies really needed to win from a confidence standpoint. 3) They overcame late-game adversity. The Grizzlies second-to-last possession seemingly went on forever. I haven’t seen anything like it in a late-game scenario since the Pacers did something similar to the Washington Wizards last year. The Pacers played remarkable defense...CONTINUE READING AT 8p9s |
Sean Highkin: Midseason Report - The Chaos Engine, Derailed Before the regular season started, the PRS staff took turns guessing the Blazers’ win total. I predicted Portland would finish the season with 24 wins. Halfway through the season, it’s safe to say that guess was low. They’re already at 20 and somehow, improbably, are just one game under .500 on the year. In some ways, it’s confusing. But in others, it makes perfect sense. Let’s be clear about one thing: this team is not good. They’re in the thick of the race for the eighth seed in the playoffs right now, but they won’t be there at the end of the season. Nothing about what they’ve been doing is sustainable. The amount of overtime and close regulation games they’ve won was crying out for regression, and the current six-game losing streak is starting to bear that out. Whatever Terry Stotts insists to the contrary, the fact that three of the Blazers’ five starters are averaging at least 38 minutes per game is going to catch up to them, be it in the form of an injury or just general burnout. And when it does, things will get ugly, because they have arguably the worst bench in the NBA. However, even the biggest skeptic about this roster can’t deny that the team is a lot better than anyone thought they’d be going into the season, and the things that have made it so are what makes the future of the franchise so promising. I’ll admit that I didn’t know a lot about Stotts when he was hired, outside of his less -than-stellar head coaching record with the Hawks and Bucks from several years ago. He seemed like a “safe” hire, without much upside but someone Neil Olshey and Paul Allen could sell to fans as having head coaching experience. He had Rick Carlisle’s endorsement, having spent four years as an assistant with the Mavericks, but the choice felt uninspired. With his first season in Portland at the halfway mark, however, it’s clear that Stotts was absolutely the right man for the job. I couldn’t be more impressed with what he’s gotten out of this roster, both from a basketball standpoint and as an off-court leader. His movement-heavy offense has done wonders in maximizing Nicolas Batum’s talents. Stotts deserves Coach of the Year consideration for what he’s done with Batum alone. His emphasis on the pick-and-roll has also helped foster great chemistry between Damian Lillard and LaMarcus Aldridge. And most importantly, he’s swiftly won the respect of everyone on the team. After the disastrous end to Nate McMillan’s tenure last season, the need for a unified locker room was made plain if the franchise was to recover, and the fact that he’s gotten everyone to buy in despite the recent losing streak and other tough stretches earlier in the season speaks volumes. Beyond Batum, whose recent growth I wrote about extensively last week and our own Danny Nowell has also written beautifully about, the player who has deservedly garnered the most attention from fans and media alike is the rookie Lillard. His Rookie of the Year campaign isn’t as clear-cut as it appeared at the beginning of the season, with Anthony Davis healthy and looking as good as advertised, and Andre Drummond dominating in limited minutes in Detroit. But while Lillard’s performance has inevitably slid since his otherworldly first few games in the league, he’s shown an ability to adapt his game and correct his shortcomings which will serve him well going forward. His month-by-month splits at HoopData have shown him steadily improving as a finisher around the rim and growing more efficient with his midrange shot. His assist rate and turnover rate have also improved month-to-month. Taken as a whole, his shooting percentages are underwhelming, but mySynergySports ranks him 24th in the NBA in scoring efficiency in pick-and-rolls, 12th in isolations, and 14th in spot-ups. His advanced age for a rookie lowers his ceiling, and makes it unlikely that he’ll ever rank with the truly elite point guards, the Chris Pauls and Russell Westbrooks and Kyrie Irvings of the league. But make no mistake: Lillard’s been very, very good, and the organization has every reason to believe it’s in good hands with him running the offense. I’m offering a mea culpa on Wesley Matthews, whom I killed during the summer and the preseason. So far, his dreadful 2011-12 season is looking more like an outlier than a genuine regression. His numbers aren’t quite up to his excellent first season with the Blazers in 2010-11, but they’re far closer to that benchmark than they are to last year. In particular, his laughably bad 49.5 percent efficiency on shots at the rim from last season is back up to a healthy 58.8, and he’s hitting three-pointers at a 39.5 percent clip. As one of the longer-tenured Blazers (strange as it sounds, given that he’s only in his third season with the club, only Aldridge and Batum outrank him in that regard), he’s also assumed something of a leadership role, preaching consistency and accountability. As for Aldridge, I’ve long been an advocate of trading him sooner rather than later to maximize return and commit to a full rebuild, but now I’m not so sure. With the Blazers’ core developing faster than anticipated, Aldridge is worth keeping around while Olshey adds ancillary pieces, rather than trading to blow the entire roster up. Plus, he’s been pretty great. He’s been taking more long twos, a function of Stotts’ attempts to adapt this roster to the Dirk Nowitzki- centered offense he and Carlisle ran in Dallas. And while Aldridge is (obviously) not nearly the shooter Nowitzki is, his efficiency from midrange has held relatively consistent with previous seasons even as the volume has increased. He still ranks 22nd in the league as a post scorer, per Synergy. But the biggest jump, by far, has been his defense. Erik Gundersen’s excellent recent piece on Blazers.com broke this down in more detail, but according to Synergy, he’s allowing a mere 0.58 points per possession on post-ups, the ninth-best mark in the league. So that’s what’s going well for the Blazers. Unfortunately, their four best players cannot play 48 minutes a game (“We’ll see about that,” said Tom Thibodeau), and besides the obvious bench issues, there’s still that whole thing where J.J. Hickson is their starting center. His double-doubles are great official team social -media fodder, but to me he’s the definition of a player who’s great to have on your fantasy team and not so great to have on your actual team. Hickson has benefitted enormously from the realization that he isn’t a player for whom offensive sets should be drawn up, but he still takes a couple of cringeworthy 20-footers a game. The much-ballyhooed rebounding numbers are mostly empty calories. According to the on-court/off-court tracking site nbawowy.com, the Blazers grab 49.5 percent of all available rebounds when Hickson is on the floor, and 50.1 percent of total boards when he’s on the bench. And that’s before we get to his liability as a defender, the likes of which no metric can do justice. He steps on the basketball court for the sole purpose of racking up double-doubles, and as long as the rebound is there for him, it matters not whether he could have taken away a shot attempt in the first place. When the Blazers were winning earlier in the month, that was something you could generally look the other way on. But now that this team is starting to become who we thought they were, the fact that their starting center can’t guard anybody can’t really be ignored. The worst part of this...CONTINUE READING AT PORTLAND ROUNDBALL SOCIETY |
Pacers Mike Wells @MikeWellsNBA Jared Wade @8pts9secs Tim Donahue @TimDonahue8p9s Tom Lewis @indycornrows |
Blazers Jason Quick @jwquick Ben Golliver @blazersedge Joe Freeman @BlazerFreeman PDX Roundball @pdxroundball |
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