For years now, everyone has advocated for the Portland Trail Blazers to get Damian Lillard some help. I’m going to stop doing that and ask you to do the same. Lillard has the help; he doesn’t need any more scorers. They have plenty of those.
What Portland needs, and what every championship contender has – is defense. Something Portland is in dire need of, and Robert Covington, their prized defender they paid a king’s ransom for, cannot be their only steady contributor to.
Now, Portland might be trying their best. You can check all the stats you want. There isn’t one for “they did their best.” The fans of this team were withholding judgment on the team’s defense while they waited for Jusuf Nurkic, CJ McCollum, and Zach Collins to return from injury. Nurk has been back for a couple of weeks, only recently getting sidelined with a flare-up in his knee. CJ has never been known for his defense, and the best bet on Collins’ return date is next season. Even with a full roster, this team doesn’t have enough 2-way players to get the job done.
We were sold on the influx of veteran 2-way players with a nose for defense. Let’s face facts; this entire team is struggling on defense, including the new faces we were told would help the team get on track.
I will save you hours of research and tell you this critical fact – every single player in the starting lineup and every player in the second unit has the worst defensive rating of their career. That’s awful beyond awful. Portland was the 5th worst defensive team last season; this year, they are also 5th worst, although they could place even lower by the end of the regular season next month.
And yet this team currently holds the sixth seed in the west, and that’s where it gets really tough to know how good they are. They do win a lot of games in the regular season. They typically have Terry Stotts as the head coach and Damian Lillard as the face of the franchise. But this year feels different. Last year they weren’t supposed to be good with such a different roster, and to their credit until they got in the bubble, they weren’t good. This year they were supposed to take one, maybe even two big steps forward and contend in the West. While they are competing, they are not contending. No one outside of Portland has this team as a contender, and that’s not just media or east coast or basketball snob bias. It’s a fact. This team isn’t contending. They’re beating the teams they’re supposed to, and they’re struggling against the teams they’re supposed to lose to. That’s not a recipe for success.
This brings me back to my original point – Lillard isn’t the guy that needs help anymore. It’s Covington. Portland has a top-5 offense. Scoring isn’t the issue. The issue, and it’s front and center every time they take the court, is their bottom-5 defense. It doesn’t matter how many scorers this team puts on their roster. If they don’t have playmakers on the other end, they aren’t going on a deep playoff run. The best playoff run Portland went on in recent memory is the 2019 playoffs when they finally made it back to the Western Conference Finals. That team had a defense placed in the top 15, paired with a top 10 offense. That team was balanced both in roster build and how they played their opponents. They didn’t blow up the scoreboard every night, but they didn’t let their opponent do so either. This team is so worried about scoring they aren’t worried about stopping the other team from scoring. It doesn’t take a genius to realize this problem, but it will take one to solve it.
The challenge is that as good as Portland is on paper, and this might be the deepest they have been in years; they aren’t that good on the court. Many folks were excited about trading Rodney Hood and Gary Trent Jr for Norman Powell, and that was a good deal. But Powell can’t fix this team on defense, and while neither Trent Jr nor Hood was stopping the other side as often as they needed to, I’m not sure this trade made the team better. Giving up two first-round picks for Covington made sense at the time, but now that we’ve seen he can’t carry the team on that side of the court, perhaps that was one first-rounder too many.
The team may clean up their defense long enough to clinch a spot, but unless they pull a 180 and start slowing elite teams, there won’t be much point in them getting in the playoffs. Yes, it’s true that once you’re in, you have at least a chance to get to the Finals, but it’s a big ask for this team to go on the road more than they play at home and beat some elite offensive teams who are also elite defensive teams.
Portland is elite on offense, and that makes them competitive. If they want to be seen as a contender, they will need to be elite or passable on defense. Until they turn this around, the only thing they are competing for is a low draft pick and another summer trying to tweak the roster on a budget with a pool of players that don’t see Portland as an NBA destination. If they don’t get Covington some help, it won’t matter how much help they get Lillard. They will both be leaders on a team that can’t get it done.
