The Portland Trail Blazers’ unstoppable play call that could make its return during NBA Disney

Along with the return of key players, the Portland Trail Blazers will be able to reintroduce one of their more dominant play designs when the NBA season resumes.

It’s almost sacrilegious to classify a team that perennially ranks among the top of the league in isolations and dribbles per game as a “beautifully-run offense.” Yet, in many ways, that’s exactly how we view the Portland Trail Blazers’ motion offense when all its parts are working in symphony.

No team in the NBA has thrown fewer passes as a team in 2019-20, a byproduct of both the moving parts on this year’s roster, as well as the injuries that have forced “hero ball” tendencies. But now that the Blazers are at mostly full-health, the book of sets and schemes — and one in particular — that they used to use to destroy opposing defenses, gets reopened.

Last year, the Blazers rode the wheels of that motion offense until they were roadblocked by the Golden State Warriors’ resistance. Having Jusuf Nurkić’s high-post abilities opens up what is called the “slice handoff” from the elbow, a staple in the Blazers playbook.

When everything goes right, the play feels like the equivalent to the read-option in the NFL. It uses four different players. Last year, it sequenced as follows:

A guard-to-guard handoff among the left sidelines, say Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum. McCollum throws off to the “4” or wing along the top of the key, say Al-Farouq Aminu, and then cuts toward the middle of the floor, using a screen from a big (say, Nurkić ). And then Lillard comes along the baseline with a head of steam and his dominant hand in tow, and he can pick apart a defense as he sees fit.

The play itself has many nuances and wrinkles, as you can see in this compilation. There’s the option to hit McCollum on the cut, if the top of the key big has the confidence to do so. If the defense sags on that big (in this case, Aminu, or this year, Carmelo Anthony), they can fire. Or, as we saw oftentimes last year, either Lillard gets a bucket, or uses his gravity to draw two players, and hit the big that hands off on a short roll to the basket.

Believe me, it’s much more beautiful to watch in person, as opposed to this size 11 font.

The Blazers didn’t abandon this play, but it certainly wasn’t as common an occurrence. The Blazers seemed to understand that running the play with Whiteside versus Nurkić wouldn’t yield the same results, and that comes with respect to Whiteside’s passing; he’s gone from 36 assists over his first 140 games to becoming at least a serviceable passer. It absolutely deserves to be mentioned how in-sync he was with McCollum on simple give-and-go reads and quick cuts.

But, the play itself seemed to generate some of the easiest looks I’ve ever seen Lillard have, and so out of quarantine boredom, I went and tried to catalog each time the Portland Trail Blazers successfully ran a rendition of that play. Here are the only three similar ones I could find, mostly off backdoor cuts.

Statistics appear to back that up, too. Whiteside has made 1,077 passes to Lillard this year, per NBA.com. That’s only led to a score on 13 occasions. And that’s a far cry from last season, when Nurkić passed to Lillard 1,746 times, and found a score 59 times.

We’ve seen Lillard give up a small share of that midrange shot frequency in comparison to last year. As a team, those numbers were reflective, too:

Dribble hand-off statistics:
2019-20:
— 3.5% frequency (No. 27 in NBA)
— 1.04 points per possession (No. 3)
— 55.2% eFG% (No. 1)
— 271 total points created (No. 23)

2018-19:
— 6.6% frequency (No. 8 in NBA)
— 0.97 points per possession (No. 8 in NBA)
— 50.7 eFG% (No. 9 in NBA)
— 595 total points created (No. 6)

As evidenced by those numbers, the Portland Trail Blazers were solid when they did use those handoffs created on plays like the slice cut, but didn’t quite have the personnel needed to run it as frequently as they did last year. Because we’ve so rarely seen it in 2019-20, the Blazers will likely have “thief in the night” play(s) that defenses can’t quite account for.

The long layoff until Jul. 31 has led us to in some ways belabor just how much of the game opens up for the Portland Trail Blazers when a healthy roster is intact. And this is just another wrinkle.

Just like it’s players, one of the team’s most effective play calls should be able to make a smooth return. And where Portland will lack in star power and comfort in the standings, they should be able to make up with synergy.