Despite the losing streak, we’re still in it. Warriors will probably lose tomorrow too. Right now, we have… 10. Warriors 27-27 Suns 26-28 Spurs 23-29 Blazers 23-32 I think we still have a great shot.
Blazers still 4.5 games out of the play-in...technically I think the Blazers will lose the tiebreaker with Golden State so Portland would hypothetically be 5.5 games behind if they split the remaining 2 games Blazers have a chance to win the tie-breaker with Sacramento but they have to win the 4th game in Sacramento. If Portland wins they'd pick up 2 games on the Kings. If Portland loses, Sacramento wins the tiebreaker because of better conference record (Blazers with a very remote mathematical chance, but no practical chance Blazers 3.5 games behind the Suns but the Suns basically own the tiebreaker of effectively Blazers are 4.5 games behind Blazers 1.5 games behind the Spurs, but Spurs own the tiebreaker so the gap is 2.5 games **************************************************************************** Power Ranking Guru rates the remaining strength of schedule: ***************************************************** Tankathon: ************************************************************************** Portland has 5 relatively easy games left for February, but then the schedule gets brutal in March Phoenix has the hardest remaining SOS. Golden State the easiest
It comes down to these 5 games after the allstar break. Lakers are trying to integrate new players so could be very beatable. Other 4 opponents suck. If Blazers are going to make a run they need to win most these games
We were just developing players and that started to lead to wins. To tank, we’d have to bring in G-Leaguers to take care of things and bench our talented young players and that’s bad for their development so we better get a good pick.
Our talented young players are already benched. We'd have lost more games early if we had started the season tanking. We'd be on our way to top 4 odds.
Avdija, Scoot, Camara, Clingan, and Scoot are young players who’ve improved and helped us win games. We are better when Clingan starts than when Ayton starts. We played some of our best ball when both Ant and Ayton sat out. It’s our young players who are most responsible for the winning. Yes, you could’ve lost more games but it would’ve been at the expensive of developing our young guys. Teaching them how to lose.
There is going to be notable progress. They are young. We would see this progress even if we'd only won five games this season.
No. By progressing, they learn how to win games. If they’ve only won 5 games, exactly what have they learned? How to get empty stats? If they improve on defense and they improve on offense, winning is inevitable. I’ve never seen a team of players who get better and better without ever improving in the win column.
If they had only 5 wins by this point they would still have room to win more games the rest of the season. They could win 5-10 more and still be in great lotto position. And all of those wins would be earned solely on the strength of our youth. I would argue our young guys would gain far more knowledge of winning in that scenario than by trying to artificially pump Grant and Simons trade value up.
Now we just need players who get better and better and not just better and plateau( looking at sharpe and simons, who both plateaued). 3-5 years away still. Minimum.
