The Portland Trail Blazers have forged an identity as a defensive-minded, scrappy young team. That emphasis on defense, length and switchability helped the Blazers finish the second half of last season strong, improving their year-end win total by 15. Heading into the 2025-26 season, the Blazers are hoping that improved defense takes another leap and carries the franchise to its first postseason berth since 2021.<\/p>\n
That topic of defense is the focal point of today\u2019s community discussion question:<\/p>\n
Where will the Blazers\u2019 defense finish the 2025-26 season?<\/p>\n
Last season, the Blazers finished as the 16th-best defense in the league with a defensive rating of 113.7 over 82 games. However, that league-average finish was split by two wildly different halves. Over the first 41 games, the Blazers posted the NBA\u2019s third-worst defense with a defensive rating of 117.5. Then over the final 41 games, Portland\u2019s defense soared to the NBA\u2019s third-best with a defensive rating of 110.0. Today\u2019s question really comes down to how sustainable and \u201cfor real\u201d you view that second-half defensive performance.<\/p>\n
The Blazers have several factors that lend to the glass-half-full side of that argument: Toumani Camara is back after earning NBA All-Defensive Second-Team honors in just his second season; Elite paint protector Donovan Clingan will step into a larger role after a solid rookie campaign; defensive great Jrue Holiday is now on the roster; and defensive specialist Matisse Thybulle is healthy after missing most of last season.<\/p>\n
Can those factors help the Blazers finish next season with a top-10 defense? Do you think a top-five defense is possible for 82 games? Or do you see another league-average defensive finish, just maybe with less dramatic swings along the way? (Or, sure to be an unpopular thought, do you even see regression coming Portland\u2019s way?)<\/p>\n
What do you think? Call your shot in the comments below!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Portland Trail Blazers have forged an identity as a defensive-minded, scrappy young team. That emphasis on defense,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,89844,89845,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-128913","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-blazers-gameday-coverage","11":"tag-discussion-and-gameday-threads","12":"tag-nba","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}