The challenge of guarding Damian Lillard and the Portland Trail Blazers

1. This first clip provides a nice baseline view of what makes guarding the Portland Trail Blazers so difficult. With three elite floor spacers around the perimeter and two great off-the-dribble three-point shooters in Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum, the Blazers are able to set their ball screens well above the three-point line and forcing Nikola Jokic to step far outside of his comfort zone.

2. If Jokic sags even a little bit too far off of the three-point line, both Lillard and McCollum are comfortable sprinting into a pull-up three-pointer.

3. If Jokic steps up to high, he risks getting beat around the corner.

These examples are the most damning ones. No center is great at containing guards this far out onto the perimeter but Jokic is especially vulnerable in these spots since he is slow-footed in open space. Still, he can be much better than he was in game one and the Nugget sneed him to take away these moment when the ball handler is able to turn the corner on the PnR and get to the rim. 19 three-pointers are one thing but you’ve got to take away either the paint or the three-point line in today’s NBA. Give up both and you will get cooked.

4. The next link in the defensive chain for the Nuggets is the backside rotation. The entire team was slow to give the second and third efforts required against a team that is in a groove and passing the way the Blazers were on Saturday night but Michael Porter Jr. stood out at a couple of key moments as being slow to recognize the secondary layers to help side rotations.

In the clip below, he does a nice job of rotating over to cut off the rolling big man but is late recognizing the next step; bumping off of Enes Kanter and closing out on Anfernee Simons.

5. On this possession, Porter rotates to the paint when it wasn’t his responsibility, giving up a wide open kickout to the three-point line.

6. If the Nuggets are unable to take the Blazers away from their super high ball screens, the best bet will be forcing Nurkic to become a complex decision maker. Rolling bigs only have a few reads to make once they catch the ball so forcing them to make difficult decisions isn’t easy. But there are degrees of difficulty at play here and the Nuggets routinely made things easy on Nurkic by arriving in help late, low, or so that he could get to his right hand.

7. Porter’s defense wasn’t all bad and the moments he made great defensive plays were the moments the Nuggets built momentum. The back-to-back plays below helped cap off a great stretch that saw the Nuggets claw out from a 10-point deficit to take a five-point lead late in the 2nd quarter.  Stretches like this one are strong evidence for Denver’s ability to build momentum in this series if they can lock in defensively.

8. This possession highlighted two weaknesses in porter’s game; inability to hold off defenders and a lack of floor balance recognition.

9. The Nuggets generated a few great possessions thanks to some off ball screening action with MPJ.

10. Along those same lines, this well-timed pindown screen occupied the weak-side defense long enough to generate a wide open layup.

11. I expected a lot more of these types of plays in game one. Perhaps we will see Gordon in the PnR more frequently in game two as a way to better space the floor and create switches.

12. Speaking of forcing switches, this “stack” PnR sideline out-of-bounds play created a great switch and easy offensive rebound. “Stack” or “Spain” refers to the action when one screener (Jokic) receives a secondary screen from another player (Gordon). In this case, Nurkic has to drop on the first screen to wall off the paint but is then vulnerable to Gordon’s screen and forced to switch. Bonus points to Jokic for accentuating the switch by quickly skipping the ball back to the wing.

13. This is an action that I would love the Nuggets to adopt for Michael Porter Jr. Like McCollum, Porter is an enormous threat when he can get to the elbows off of a handoff, PnR, or dribble pitch. But if the defense walls off that first option, go into your shooting motion and kick it back to Jokic at the top of the key and immediately run back into a hand off for a three.

It’s an incredibly difficult action to defend and tailor made for Jokic and Porter’s skillsets.

14. Gordon is the player who most needs to step up in game two. In addition to missing free throws, post-ups against mismatches, and putbacks, he just didn’t sustain the appropriate level of intensity. This was especially true of the most critical moment of the game in which he got beat backdoor by Carmelo Anthony for an and-one before being forced into a turnover on the very next possession.

15. I know I am shouting into an abyss about this but the biggest regulatory stain on the rulebook is how the league rewards these types of fake shooting fouls.

16. But plays like this one are cool.