Portland Trail Blazers: Rethinking CJ McCollum’s Slump

Digging deeper into these initial conclusions:

My shift to the other side of the debate started when I saw this tweet from Pinwheel Empire:

In the thread, PWE breaks down some ways that the narrative over CJ’s down year have been exaggerated. I highly encourage anyone who hasn’t to check out the conversation around this tweet and their account in general.

One place to look immediately, that both PWE and Deckard mention, is at McCollum’s true shooting percentage. He currently holds a .540, which is up from last year’s .536. This is likely the result of shooting a career-high percentage on two-point shots (.512). Weird that a player who has actually increased their accuracy – especially in a statistic that takes efficiency into account – is considered slumping this season.

As for his lesser impact statistics, like win shares and VORP, these numbers are more likely the result of his new functionality in the offense this season than his being less important. No longer is the club staggering point guard minutes between Dame and CJ; instead, the team has almost exclusively played the two guards together this season as Evan Turner has taken the reigns of the second-unit.

Per basketball-reference’s play-by-play stats, McCollum has logged zero percent of his minutes as a point guard this year. This is down from when he played point guard nine percent of the time last year and way down from the 30 percent he played the year before.

Playing more with Lillard and the first-team affects McCollum’s other stats, like his assists and rebounds. Just by positional definition, a full-time shooting guard is less often tasked with being the playmaker than the point guard. And when playing more alongside rebounders like Jusuf Nurkic and Al-Farouq Aminu, there is less glass for him to clean.

McCollum also has far less opportunities this year to find his own rhythm. No longer can he dribble the clock and step into a three more naturally or take over a game when the other starters head to the bench. Instead, he is more often Robin to Lillard’s Batman than ever before, and his individual impact statistics have suffered because of it.

But this isn’t to say McCollum hasn’t made the team very powerful when on the floor. In fact, the Blazers are 11.2 points better per 100 possessions with McCollum on the court than with him off. This is the highest mark he’s reached in his career by far.

Last year, the team was 2.1 points worse with him on the floor. Of course, this is likely due to his playing with the bench more often, but still. This year, we are seeing more clearly just how good he helps make this team when he shares the floor with Lillard.