Don’t look now, but the Portland Trail Blazers have won four out of their last five games. With the Utah Jazz on tap tonight, there’s a decent chance they can make it five of six. The Blazers haven’t gotten
magically healthier. Their opponents were not suddenly terrible. Rather Portland appears to be shoring up a single weakness, allowing them to prevail in games they otherwise were barely losing.
That weakness is simple: the three-point arc.
No, not shooting it. Defending it.
Back on December 27th, before the Blazers beat the Boston Celtics to start this mini-jag of winning, they ranked 18th in the NBA with a 36.4% percentage allowed to opponents at the three-point arc. 18th doesn’t seem horrible, but for a team built mostly—almost exclusively—out of mobile, athletic wings, getting out to cover the perimeter should come standard and be done well. More to the point, the Blazers were giving up over three percentage points to opponents, as their own shooting percentage from distance stood at 33.3%. A nightly deficit like that will wear on you over time, like wind blowing against the sandcastle of Portland’s playoff hopes.
Here are the opponent shooting three-point shooting percentages for the last five games:
- Boston Celtics—29.5%
- Dallas Mavericks—34.4%
- Oklahoma City Thunder—32.7%
- New Orleans Pelicans—26.7%
- San Antonio Spurs—32.3%
Combined, those teams shot 58-186 against the Blazers, for a 31.2% average.
In that same interim, the Blazers have been on a heater, shooting 37.8% themselves from range. Frankly, they’re a poor shooting team. Neither that number nor the +6.6 percentage point gap it’s generated are sustainable. Going from -3 to nearly +7 is a massive leap.
But the Blazers don’t need all that. It’s enough that they bring the opponent down closer to their own level of shooting. Even when Portland’s own shots aren’t falling, they should be able to defend. And the difference between allowing 36.4% and 31.2% is huge. They’ve already jumped from 18th in the league defending the arc to 11th on the basis of the last two weeks. If they can keep this up, they’ll creep towards the Top 5.
Portland’s perimeter defenders deserve credit for the uptick in effort lately, but no more so than Donovan Clingan. As the defense has extended, Clingan has (for the most part) held steady in the middle, allowing his teammates to take risks without worrying about their backs. Clingan has far fewer blocks over the last five games than his season average. He’s blocked one shot total, in fact. But his position/area defense has been stout. His defensive rebounding is up. Most importantly, he’s stayed on the floor. He had a short outing of 17 minutes against the Thunder, but in Portland’s four wins, Clingan averaged 34 minutes played, far higher than his season average of 27. The Blazers don’t need Donovan to be a superstar. Providing a defensive wall in the paint is enough. He’s been doing that lately.
The Jazz shoot a fair number of threes and make them at a modest level. Let’s see if Portland’s prowess keeps up tonight. But either way, we can probably point to this stretch as a time when they finally started to get it defensively. Holding four of five teams below their season average and coming up with an 80% win rate is not too shabby for this young squad. It’s indicative of what they’ll need to do in order to convert streaky winning into consistency.
