The Portland Trail Blazers struggled heavily on defense
The Portland Trail Blazers have spoken openly about tightening their defense repeatedly throughout the offseason and preseason. We’ve yet to see the evidence to back it up.
It seems Billups intends to limit the amount of threes his team gives up. While limiting perimeter scoring should be an ideal defensive strategy in today’s NBA, the execution has to be there.
Portland was committing hasty closeouts throughout the game, which resulted in either an open lane or a collapsed one with an ensuing open three anyways.
Billups has eradicated the Blazers drop coverage, instead opting to pull the big men up on screens to try to hedge the ball-handlers. Unfortunately, since Portland can’t switch on screens — because they don’t have the personnel to do so — and their guards treat bigs setting picks like the Red Light, Green Light robot from Squid Games, the Kings were able to get whatever they wanted coming out of that action.
The Blazers shouldn’t expect much help coming in the way of personnel, so either their guards are going to have to work harder to get around screens or Billups will need to find a new scheme. Either way, something’s going to have to give, because they won’t win many games giving up 124 points.