5 takeaways from Portland Trail Blazers win over the Minnesota Timberwolves

Lots of great ball movement

If there’s one thing Rip City loves this year, it’s ball movement. When the team zips passes around the perimeter, or makes slick dump passes to a guy waiting to dunk, the ceiling of this team is revealed.

Nearly everyone on this team can put the ball on the deck and make plays. With guys from Dame to Stauskas to Maurice Harkless, there is more versatility on this roster than meets the eye. And when the club has so many flashy passing sequences throughout one game, it makes you wonder why they don’t look for the open man more often.

But it’s more than just one slick no-looker. The Blazers also ran several transition plays where guys penetrated to find an open man who threw a touch-pass for an even more wide open shooter. They were unselfish, playing like the team that all the Jason Quick stories say they are – tight-knit, trusting, and levelheaded.

With all this versatility, the Blazers should continue making teams pay whenever their opponents over-commit to any one threat. They ended the game with 23 assists.

But it wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies. The team also turned it over 19 times tonight. Usually a sloppy performance like that is hard to come out on the winning end from. Thankfully, though, the Blazers cleaned up their act at the right time, coughing up the ball only once in the fourth.