PORTLAND, Ore. – Drive by any park in this city, and you’re likely to see strangers dribbling, passing up and down an asphalt basketball court, its flat, hard surface often in the shadow of a flat, steel roof to protect it from the commonly wet conditions of the winter months.
Last September another group of players began gathering for pickup games here. In some ways, they were different than their pavement-populating counterparts. For one, they were playing indoors, and for another, they were professionals, all bearing the colors of the Portland Trail Blazers. But they were most certainly strangers.
Only six players in those preseason pickup games had worn a Blazers uniform the previous season, leading to many hearty introductions but just as many quiet questions about how the roster would come together.
“You always wonder,” said guard Gerald Henderson, who had arrived three months earlier in June via a trade. “Whenever you have a new group, you never know how it’s going to work out.”
It has worked out well enough that the Blazers head to Los Angeles for Game 5 of their Western Conference quarterfinals series against the Clippers with a 2-2 series tie. They have won the past two games in the series and face a Clippers team Wednesday night that will be without All-Star point guard Chris Paul (broken right hand) and forward Blake Griffin (strained left quadriceps).
Portland’s improved play over Games 2, 3 and 4 and the Clippers’ injuries have led to sudden speculation that the Blazers may be the more likely team to advance to a Western semifinal matchup against the winner of the Golden State-Houston series. But for all of their self-assurance, they also are certain the Clippers won’t back down.
“They still have a really good team,” Blazers guard Damian Lillard said of the Clippers. “For us, our mindset has to be nothing changes.”
The Blazers have managed change better than any team in the league this season.
Portland lost nine of its first 13 games and was 11-20 at Christmas, but it went 33-18 after that and earned the fifth seed in the Western Conference Playoffs.
Starting with the pickup games in Portland and a field trip/workout getaway to San Diego in September, and an October training camp conducted under a clear vision from Blazers coach Terry Stotts, Portland’s overhauled roster turned into an unlikely winner. No playoff team has fewer holdovers from the 2014-15 season than Portland, and none have a roster younger than Portland, with an average age of 24.89 years. They are the first NBA team to make the playoffs with only two or fewer players who logged at least 1,000 minutes for the team the previous season.
Portland did it by giving many of its players more minutes than they’d ever played, and, related to that, more responsibility than they ever had. Stotts and the Blazers staff focused on individual player development and the idea that if players were given expanded on-court duties and improved in such roles, the team would get better as the season progressed. “And thankfully that’s sort of what’s happened,” Stotts said.
Four veteran players have reached career highs in minutes for Portland this season, and it’s not a coincidence that those four players – forward Al-Farouq Aminu, guard C.J. McCollum, center Mason Plumlee and guard Allen Crabbe – had the best performances in Game 4 Monday against the Clippers.
“I think most players in this league want the opportunity,” Stotts said. “And they want to say, ‘I could do that if given the opportunity,’ which is human nature, and they should have that. And that was the case for a lot of players this year. And most of them, if not all of them, took advantage of it.”
McCollum became the NBA’s Most Improved Player. After two of Portland’s best outside shooters, Nicolas Batum and Wesley Matthews, moved on, Aminu and Crabbe moved in and gave the Blazers a similar contribution. Once in the starting lineup, Maurice Harkless became a key defender and finisher at the rim and doubled his scoring and rebounding averages. Portland is 12-6 with him in the starting five.
Plumlee, meanwhile, came to Portland via a draft-day trade last summer ready to embrace whatever came his way. During his two seasons as a part-time starter with the Brooklyn Nets, he said, veterans guaranteed him he would get a chance to contribute on the court, but the timing never would be guaranteed, so he would have to be ready for it. “Essentially, that’s your job,” Plumlee said.
Plumlee said he was eager for a bigger role entering his third season and has acknowledged the opportunity Stotts’ motion offense affords him. Stotts said it was clear in the September pickup games that Plumlee’s ball-handling and passing made him unique for a post player and that it made the Blazers want to put him in a role to maximize those skills.
In September, Plumlee said, those skills helped ingratiate him with his new teammates. In the playoffs, they have helped the Blazers get open shots around the arc and uncontested ones in the paint. After averaging 2.8 assists in the regular season, he’s up to 6.5 in the playoffs to go with a 12.3 rebounding average.
“Just now we’re getting to the point where you shoot a guy a look, and you make eye contact and it’s like, OK, if we make eye contact, I know you’re cutting,” Plumlee said. “That’s kind of like the evolution of a team, that’s so exciting and it makes it so much fun.”
After finishing second in the NBA Coach of the Year balloting Tuesday, Stotts said, “It’s been a special year.” That’s partly because the season began with such a unusual roster circumstance. Now the Blazers are looking to end it by advancing beyond the first round for only the second time since 2000.
“This group was unique because we had so many different pieces coming in together,” Plumlee said. “It was more that everybody was trying to feel each other out and get a sense for how the other person likes to play and then really bring out the best in everybody.”
Now, he added, “We believe in ourselves enough to finish it off.”
