As the dust settles from a hectic offseason in Rip City, where do the Portland Trail Blazers stack up in the West now heading into the 2025-26 season?<\/p>\n
While that may read like a low mark to some readers, the quality depth in the West may be most to blame for the placement. The tone of Schuhmann\u2019s analysis sounded much more positive when discussing the improvement the Blazers showed last season and how strong their defense could be this upcoming season. He also seemed to see the merits behind the Jrue Holiday acquisition more than other national writers Blazer\u2019s Edge has aggregated this summer.<\/p>\n
Schuhmann explained those merits in his analysis, along with why this is a pivotal year for Blazers guards Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe.<\/p>\n
Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe need to play a lot, because the Blazers need to figure out what they have in the young duo (21 and 22 years old, respectively) before Lillard comes back from his Achilles tear. Both saw jumps in efficiency last season and both still have plenty of room for improvement. Holiday is versatile enough to play alongside either one, giving the Blazers a pretty unique three-man guard rotation.<\/p>\n
Holiday also joins a list of terrific defenders in Portland, and the departures of Simons and Ayton were addition by subtraction defensively. The Blazers had the league\u2019s third-ranked defense (110.0 points allowed per 100 possessions) over their last 41 games last season, and they certainly have the potential for more defensive success, especially if Holiday can teach the young guards a thing or two.<\/p>\n
In his power rankings, which run weekly during the NBA season, Schuhmann always includes three insightful stats about each team. In one of those bullet points from this edition, he shows that the Blazers took a massive leap in defensive paint protection last season, especially when Donovan Clingan was on the floor.<\/p>\n
They saw the league\u2019s biggest drop in opponent field goal percentage in the paint, from 61.3% (30th) in \u201923-24 to 56.2% (11th) last season. Their opponents shot much worse in the paint with Donovan Clingan on the floor (53.4%) than with Ayton (58.8%).<\/p>\n
The Blazers\u2019 spot at No. 11 puts them just ahead of the Sacramento Kings at No. 12 and just behind the San Antonio Spurs at No. 10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the dust settles from a hectic offseason in Rip City, where do the Portland Trail Blazers stack…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,47884,590,85],"class_list":["post-58561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-blazers-news","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58561","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=58561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}