Despite being one of the most injured teams in the league, the Portland Trail Blazers have overcome their early-season adversity. They now sit at 16-20 after surprisingly winning four of their last five games, the most recent of which was a 115-110 win over the San Antonio Spurs.
This may have been a different outcome had Victor Wembanyama (knee) been healthy, but this is an impressive road win for a Blazers team that still entered the contest as underdogs. The X-Factor for Portland was second-year center Donovan Clingan, who finished with a career-high 24 points to go along with 12 rebounds and four assists in 34 minutes.
Donovan Clingan is proving his ceiling is higher than anyone expected
Portland won the three-point battle convincingly, shooting 42% compared to San Antonio's 32%. That was also an unexpected factor considering the Blazers entered the contest as the second-worst three-point shooting team in the league, ahead of only the Indiana Pacers.
Three-point shooting and Clingan went hand-in-hand as the Blazers' 7-foot-2 big man connected on 3-of-5 of his attempts from beyond the arc. We criticized Clingan earlier in the season for not playing to his strengths as a dominant interior presence, but he's proving his skeptics wrong as someone who is already well-equipped for the modern NBA.
Clingan is now shooting 32.1% from downtown; that's an encouraging improvement from his 28.6% as a rookie, especially considering the volume has increased from 0.7 to 2.6 attempts per game.
Portland has a modern-day Brook Lopez
The Blazers have a modern-day Brook Lopez on their hands, as Clingan is providing valuable rim protection and floor spacing. Even better, unlike Lopez, he's actually an elite rebounder, already ranking seventh in the association with 10.5 rebounds per game.
Overall, the Blazers have struggled with their shooting, which has clogged the paint for Deni Avdija, Shaedon Sharpe, and other athletic players who prefer to get downhill. Clingan has helped compensate for this roster weakness as a surprising three-point shooting threat. Avdija wasn't his efficient self in this contest, recording 29 points on 9-of-23 shooting. Still, he was there when the Blazers needed him the most in crunch time, and Clingan's presence had a lot to do with that as a complementary piece that San Antonio had to pay attention to.
The Blazers took Clingan with the No. 7 overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft largely because of the safe floor he provided in a weak and uncertain draft class. That was evident as a rookie as his rebounding and rim protection translated from UConn to the NBA. However, his second-year ascension as a floor spacer proves that Clingan also has a much higher ceiling than many give him credit for.
He's not just fitting into Portland's young core -- he's quickly become a focal point of their entire rebuild. And it's largely thanks to the two-way impact he now provides.