Beginning on Valentine’s Day and ending on the first day of spring, the Portland Trail Blazers looked like world beaters as they stormed to 13 straight victories. What happened next continues to puzzle the citizens of Rip City.
They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Unless your Welsh, in which case it’s April that’s in like a lion and out like a lamb. Or maybe it’s spring in general. I can’t remember.
In Portland, spring is sometimes a lion and a lamb within the space of a typical afternoon. And — as those of us who have lived here long enough know — there’s zero stability in the weather until July 5.
So what does this have to do with anything? This is a Blazers fansite, yeah?
Yeah, it is!
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And what I’m really getting at is this: The Portland Trail Blazers came into the spring like a lion and went out like lambs, just like the weather.
Or something like that. After 82 regular season games and an embarrassing four-game sweep at the hands of the New Orleans Pelicans, I’m scraping the bottom of the metaphor barrel. Cut me some slack.
The Blazers, however — they don’t get any slack.
How could a team that won 13 straight and finished third in the Western Conference get blasted out of the playoffs in just four games by a sixth-seed?
Blazers and Valentine’s Day
Oh, the rosy days of yore — Feb. 14, when thoughts turned to romance and the Blazers dominated the defending champion Golden State Warriors.
That was a swell game, with Portland winning 123-117, despite 50 points from the Warriors’ Kevin Durant.
Damian Lillard (44 points) and CJ McCollum (29 points) were whirlwinds that game, as was Jusuf Nurkic, who had returned from a mystery ailment to score 17 points and grab 13 rebounds.
That was the final Trail Blazers game before All-Star weekend, and it sent Rip City into the break thinking nothing but good things were on the horizon.
That was true. Until it wasn’t.
Blazers Win 13 Straight
The Blazers first game after the All-Star break was on Feb. 23 — a 100-81 victory over Utah; that win put a stop to what had been an 11-game winning streak by the Jazz.
For the Blazers, it was beginning to look like momentum was finally on their side.
And then it just got better and better.
Over the next three-plus weeks, the Trail Blazers would win 11 more games in a row, including victories over a bunch of the NBA’s top-tier teams: the Timberwolves; the Thunder; the Warriors (again!); the Heat; and the Cavaliers.
The streak reached 13 on March 18 in Los Angeles against the Clippers. And by this point, Portland was getting contributions from up and down the lineup: All five starters scored at least 16 points, and the second team was excellent, especially Shabazz Napier (nine points, eight assists).
Starting with that Valentine’s Day victory over the Warriors, the Blazers had the second-best defensive rating in the Association. Even their offense, which for much of the season had been statistically average, suddenly burst into the Top 10 for offensive rating.
And Then, The Losing
March 20: The first day of spring. And the Portland Trail Blazers entered it like lions.
Up next: The Houston Rockets.
And cracks began to appear in the Trail Blazers’ 13-game-win-streak armor.
Lillard (5/17) and McCollum (4/15) had terrible shooting nights. And the Blazers were unable to stop likely league MVP James Harden, who scored 42 points in just over 32 minutes of play.
The Blazers lost that game – and the next one, to the Boston Celtics — before returning to the win column with two big wins against the Thunder (for the season sweep) and the Pelicans.
But then the wheels fell off.
Over the final eight games of the regular season, the Blazers would win just three games. And they lost games to both the woeful Memphis Grizzlies (Lillard missed that game to attend to the birth of his first child) and the truly awful Dallas Mavericks (even with Lillard.)
That loss to the Mavs began what would become an 0-for-Texas road trip.
Starting with that first-day-of-spring loss to the Rockets, the Trail Blazers would go just 5-7 the rest of the way.
In like a lion. Out like a lamb.
A lame lamb.
The Numbers
And yet, the Blazers still managed to win 49 games this season, despite their poor showing at the tail end of the season. And they snagged the third seed.
But despite that impressive resume, the numbers revealed some disturbing trends.
Starting with that March 20 game against Houston, the Blazers offense went back to mediocre, and their defense — a season-long strength — collapsed, too; the Blazers’ D dropped to 13th in the league during that time.
Individual performances suffered as well during the final 12 games.
McCollum averaged almost two full points below his season average, and his three-point shooting plummeted almost 12 percent. Lillard’s three-point shooting percentage dropped more than 8 percent.
The subpar performances of the Blazers’ two best players accounts for much of the subpar performances of the team as a whole during this stretch.
But they weren’t the only players affected.
Al-Farouq Aminu, a 37 percent shooter from three during the season, shot just 27.5 percent in the final 12 games. And Napier, a key player off the bench, shot just 34 percent from the field, down from 42 percent during the season.
Long Story Short
Blazers President of Basketball Operations Neil Olshey argues that Portland’s poor showing in the first round of the playoffs shouldn’t diminish what the team accomplished all season. This might make some sense if one only looks at the number of regular season wins and their third-seed finish.
But a (not even all that) deep dive into the numbers shows that, although things may have looked swell on the outside, there were some foundational problems on the inside. Those problems were made manifest during the final stretch of the season as the Blazers prepped for the playoffs. And they were writ large in the first-round sweep against the Pelicans.
Next: What writers are saying about the Blazers’ early playoff exit
So how does a team play like champs and chumps in the space of a few weeks?
It’s bound to happen when an offense that was never more than middling starts missing makeable shots.
And it happens when a defense that was a source of seasonal pride suddenly disappears when it matters the most.