first thing, I think we all realize, or at least most of us do, that any numbers derived this early in a season shouldn't be used to form any broad conclusions about teams. Too much room in schedule differentials to keep out skew. And after a short off-season, and even shorter training camp, teams will probably take longer to find their footing than in a normal season. Of course, every team will have that disadvantage
for the purpose of the regular season at least, a more telling number is net point/100 differential of offense and defense ratings. That has always been a little better as a predictive gauge
for this season (last column):
I'm a stat fan so I've watched this for years. By the end of a season, you can take this differential without knowing team records and pretty accurately estimate what their won/loss record is; usually within a couple of games. Probably by the mid-season break this year, this differential will more closely track winnig percentages
I will say, Portland has been a team in the Stotts era that has generally over-performed that gauge by a couple of wins.
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as for defensive rating, and I think it might have been mentioned in this thread, that rating seems to be a pretty essential ingredient for a championship. I went thru the last 20 champions, and IIRC, 18 of 20 champions were top-10 in defense, and of those, most were top-5. And one of the two teams not top-10 was 11th. One team was an outlier.
my guess why defense is so important is that it can be the most consistent component of a team. In the 3 point era I'd say offense can be a lot more inconsistent than defense. So, on night when a team is shooting poorly, if they have good defense, they can still hold the scoreboard margin to a winnable 4th quarter
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another differential that was predictive of championships, although not as consistently predictive as defense, was rebounding. That makes sense because if your offense is struggling on a night, winning the 2nd chance point battle can make up for it
Portland is currently 4th in offensive rating, but they have consistently been toward the top in that category in the Dame/CJ era. But they have only played 2 teams in the top-10 of defense. 9 of 11 games have come against teams in the bottom 3rd of the league in defense. And nearly half, 5 games, have been against teams in the bottom 5
in other words, Portland's offense hasn't really been tested yet
meanwhile, the Blazers are 24th in defensive rating, 24th in offensive rebounding rate, and 7th in defensive rebounding rate
and a note about the defense: Portland has only played 2 teams in the top-10 of offense. And only 6 against the top half of the league. All that makes sense considering the Blazers have had the 29th hardest strength of schedule so far. Blazers did have that good win against the Lakers early. But their other 6 wins have come against teams with a combined record of 17-36, a 32% winning percentage.
Hopefully they can keep fattening their record and build some momentum over the easy start to their season because it's going to get a lot more difficult at the end of this month
