It’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a positive outlook on the Portland Trail Blazers’ season as they continue to disappoint when it matters most.
When Damian Lillard carries the entire weight of the team on his shoulders, they lose. When he defers to his teammates to allow them to prove their merit, they lose. Such has been the story of the Portland Trail Blazers in the 2019-20 season.
Now, it’s still early in the season. But standing at 4-7 — suffering bad losses to the Warriors and Kings along the way — Portland needs to start finding a solution for their afflictions before it’s too late. A team with this much talent should not enter overtime against the Hawks. They should not be barely scraping out games against the Thunder. Something needs to be addressed here.
Granted, most of the Trail Blazers’ weaknesses are no fault of the organization. Losing the team’s entire defensive backbone in Jusuf Nurkic, Al-Farouq Aminu and Zach Collins through free agency and injury is tough. Trading Maurice Harkless to fill in for Nurkic’s absence also seemed like a necessary move at the time.
Picking up the pieces and forging a new identity after so much roster turnover is a tall task. But if anyone could accomplish such a feat, it would be Lillard and head coach Terry Stotts. While the defense understandably has a lot of work to do, what’s more concerning is the lack of offensive firepower on this team.
Everyone expected CJ McCollum, Rodney Hood and Anfernee Simons to all step up and help produce one of the league’s best offenses. To their credit, they have each impressed individually, but all have failed to do so consistently or at the same time as one another.
As a result, Lillard is left having to drag this Trail Blazers team to victories, maintaining incredible efficiency even with his increased volume. En route to becoming an early MVP front runner, Lillard has played the most minutes and made the most field goals of any player in the entire league.
Dame decided to employ another strategy on Tuesday night against the Sacramento Kings. He only attempted ten shots, while focusing on drawing fouls and allowing his teammates to make plays. Ideally, focusing on the little things would have helped propel his team to victory.
Instead, their shots just wouldn’t fall. Perhaps it’s exaggerative to draw conclusions from one game, but this has been a running theme throughout the entire season thus far. Lillard’s entire supporting cast has thoroughly disappointed. He scored 27 points on those ten shot attempts (plus a healthy 14 free throw attempts), and yet the Trail Blazers still lost.
What more can he do? It’s now on Stotts to reel CJ in when he’s having a poor shooting night; It’s on Stotts to be daring enough to shake up the rotations, and give more minutes to players that are working hard and doing the little things — like Skal Labissiere and Nassir Little.
Portland cannot keep losing games to inferior teams. While nobody expected this road to be all sunshine and rainbows early on, if they dig themselves too deep a hole now, not even a Bosnian Beast could save them from the embarrassment of missing the playoffs.