I took a dive into the stats on basketball-reference.com to compare and contrast how the Blazers are doing compared to the rest of the league in the early season.
Does it even feel like the NBA season is already an eighth of the way through? Starting earlier makes the season go by even faster than what fans are used to.
The Blazers have already played 11 games and are 6-5. Tonight, they take on the Brooklyn Nets, a surprisingly fun team out East. A win would push them into the top five of the Western Conference despite being just 2 games over .500.
Why? Because the season is so early. Teams are still developing, meshing together. Wins and losses don’t mean much so soon in this league.
But numbers never lie, and statistics matter a lot. Taking a look at the specific numbers per team helps quite a bit when trying to weed out the contenders from the pretenders.
Let’s dive into some of those early numbers and see where the Blazers stand so far against the rest of the NBA.
Offensively
Blazers are sixth in three-point field goal percentage, but 29th in two-point field goal percentage.
That can be attested to Jusuf Nurkić’s early struggles, and even a couple of rough games from Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum. This puts Portland at 25th in the league in field goal percentage.
That isn’t a trend the team wants to continue, even with such great 3-point shooting.
On the bright side, the Blazers do lead the league in free throw percentage at 82.7%. That’s a great number for two reasons.
One, McCollum has struggled with clutch-time free throws, leading to a couple of bad losses. Last year he led the league in FT%.
Two, the Blazers rank fourth in free throws made and seventh in attempts per game. This shows us that the team is making a high level of free throws while shooting more than the average amount.
Here’s an unfortunate stat, though: Portland trails only the Phoenix Suns for the least amount of assists per game this year (18.6). Lillard is still trying to become a facilitator on offense, but he and McCollum score too often to rack up high assists numbers constantly.
It’s a blessing and a curse, but could create future problems if those two aren’t hitting.
Defensively
This side of the ball has been an infamous struggle for this team over the last few years. The duo of Lillard and McCollum put most of their energy into offense, leaving them mediocre on defense.
However, this year has shown us that the team has improved their poor defense – at least so far in the season. They are tied with the Bulls for most rebounds per game with 48.
Along with being third in offensive boards, they are seventh in defensive rebounding. They finished 15th in that stat a season ago.
Tenacious shot blocking has caught onto the Blazers as well. They’re first in the league with 6.9 per game, nearly a full block more than the closest team (Brooklyn). That is extremely promising as rim protection continues to grow with Nurkić down low. Noah Vonleh’s return has also helped.
Portland could use some quicker hands, though. They’re 19th in steals with 7.8 per game, but are less than two steals behind first (Golden State).
Let’s revisit these numbers during the two month mark of the season. It’ll show more progress by the team, plus which areas they’ve improved on and which they have not.