Game 51: Portland vs Denver 6:00pm SNW

[Roy The Natural]

CJ just isn't that good. I mean... is anyone else tired of his shooting? He bricks so many open looks that it's absurd. He's a far cry from the player in 2016-17.

In 2016-17 CJ shot 50% on WIDE OPEN looks and 40% on open looks from 3.

Last year he shot 43% on WIDE OPEN looks and 37% on open looks from 3.

Shooting similar this year.

His shooting just isn't the same. It's still good, but for his 1st two years starting he looked like he might be one of the best shooters in the league. I don't really think he is at this point. He bricks far too many standstill open looks.

[d-train]

To play the type of team defense Nuggets are playing you need players committed to working on defense that understand the plan and are familiar with each other. One weak link or missed assignment and the whole defense falls apart. The only way to beat smart team defense is smarter passing on offense.

[Epicurus]

More likely the open man is not making shots. The shot quality seems normal. The conversion of shots is about 20% less than normal. They lost ground in the early 2nd quarter with continual misses of near gimmes. From that they have not recovered.

We would shoot 100% if not for those pesky Nugget defenders. The Nuggets do their job on defense if the shots we take are more difficult than what we could get if we found the weakness in their defense. Blazers shooting versus shot quality isn't the story if we are always shooting into Nuggets fortified defense and are not passing into the weakness in Nuggets defense.

What???? I guess we could get exceptional shot quality, but the simple point that the shot quality has been at least average and the efg% has not. Is that really so complicated?

[Matt800]

Seems like Portland should rest some guys if down 30?

[Brandon-Clyde]

4th quarter GLB pic

Spoiler:

[Epicurus]

Pointblank tip-ins being missed.

[d-train]

More likely the open man is not making shots. The shot quality seems normal. The conversion of shots is about 20% less than normal. They lost ground in the early 2nd quarter with continual misses of near gimmes. From that they have not recovered.

We would shoot 100% if not for those pesky Nugget defenders. The Nuggets do their job on defense if the shots we take are more difficult than what we could get if we found the weakness in their defense. Blazers shooting versus shot quality isn't the story if we are always shooting into Nuggets fortified defense and are not passing into the weakness in Nuggets defense.

What???? I guess we could get exceptional shot quality, but the simple point that the shot quality has been at least average and the efg% has not. Is that really so complicated?

There is nothing complicated about basketball. If you try to do the hard thing 50 times a game, you will lose most of the time.

[Epicurus]

Let me make it simpler for you: there is a ball and there is a basket through which the ball must go through around 50% of the time. Tip ins are not a hard thing. Open threes are not a hard thing.

[d-train]

Let me make it simpler for you: there is a ball and there is a basket through which the ball must go through around 50% of the time. Tip ins are not a hard thing. Open threes are not a hard thing.

Like I said earlier, Blazers would make 100% if not for Nuggets defense. Nobody makes 100% when opposed by defense. The defense that makes the most difference is after the offense forces the defense to rotate. The offense that makes the most difference is when it is the result of finding the man that the defense left open to cover for the defense rotating to the ball.

[Matt800]

Little injury

[Epicurus]

You really don't understand shot quality do you? Both teams are 54% and 53% shot quality (https://www.pbpstats.com/live/nba/0021900753/team). One, however, has an efg% of 61% while the other has 45%. Want to guess who won?

[Roy The Natural]

You really don't understand shot quality do you? Both teams are 54% and 53% shot quality (https://www.pbpstats.com/live/nba/0021900753/team). One, however, has an efg% of 61% while the other has 45%. Want to guess who won?

I don't agree with you almost ever. But why are you arguing with him? You're obviously right, and d-train is the blindest of the blind. He's/She's a homer to the extreme, and has regularly displayed a complete ignorance of statistics, metrics, and general basketball logic.

I saw Nuggets players taking step back 3's all game and draining them. Blazers couldn't hit standstill wide open catch and shoot 3's most of the night. But still, the Blazers defense is an issue and was abysmal.

While I liked the shot in the arm Melo gave the team. I for one will be happy when he's let go in the offseason. He's a big issue on defense, and he's EXTREMELY close to being completely washed on offense. He still presents some value there, but his touch around the rim has pretty much abandoned him in his old-age.

[Epicurus]

Anthony does 90% of his play well, but can't finish. Legs seem gone (for an NBA player). I think tonight the turn in the game was his back-to back failure to finish at the rim.

[Epicurus]

36 ofr% for Denver and a 22% ofr% for the Blazers contributed also. It was also a comedy of rolling balls finding the Nugget ready to shot a three (and make it).

[Wizenheimer]

Dame comes back to earth and Blazers get slaughtered. Not encouraging and brings that 7-3 record over the last 10 into question. How many of those games would Portland have won if Dame is scoring 20 less points and not shooting 57% on three's?

last 4 games, CJ has 75 points on 73 shots; Whiteside has 70 points on 41 shots. That means CJ has scored 5 more points on 32 more shots....LOL

hated to see Little go down. Hopefully it's just a sprained ankle with no real damage, but he'll likely miss several games

[d-train]

You really don't understand shot quality do you? Both teams are 54% and 53% shot quality (https://www.pbpstats.com/live/nba/0021900753/team). One, however, has an efg% of 61% while the other has 45%. Want to guess who won?

I understand why shot quality isn't 100%. Do you?

We were also beat on the boards. Missed shots and rebounds are the result of their weakside defense rotating to help the helper. They were always in the ideal position and we did not match that with our own defense and didn't defeat their defense by finding the open man.

I checked your link to find the quality of your "shot quality stat." Your shot quality stat does not measure open shots or whether shots were taken against a fortified defense or a broken defense. It's measurement is based on the quality of the start of the possession, which can be useful but only measures the quality of the beginning of possessessions.

Here's what it says:

Play-by-Play Based Shot Quality Model
POSTED ON SEP 3, 2018
Not all shots are equal. While you get 2 points for both a breakaway dunk and a tightly guarded, off-balance 20 foot jumper, the dunk is the more valuable shot because it is going to be made nearly every time. Multiple people have created shot quality models to estimate the probability a shot is made based on various factors. You can read about some of them here and here. The better public models all used the no longer public SportVU shot logs. Now the models that use factors like closest defender distance and touch time, like ESPN’s Quantified Shot Quality(qSQ), are proprietary and not readily accessible.

While shot level data is no longer available for some of these important features, there is still a lot that can be gleaned from play-by-play data. With play-by-play data we can figure out, for each shot, how the possession started, the time since the possession started and the location of the shot. Using these features we should be able to create a model to estimate the probability of each shot being made that does better than using only shot location. My goal in building my own model is to create a shot quality metric that is easily available for anyone to look up on PBPStats for all the possible queries and filters. While you can get shooting stats by how open shots are on stats.nba.com, it’s not easy get those stats beyond the season-level. While this model may not be as good as some of the proprietary models, by adding in features from play-by-play data, it is better than what is publicly available and easily accessible. The model output on PBPStats can be found on the Scoring and Shooting tabs and can be interpreted as an expected effective field goal percentage based on shot location and play context.

[d-train]

Anthony does 90% of his play well, but can't finish. Legs seem gone (for an NBA player). I think tonight the turn in the game was his back-to back failure to finish at the rim.

He is limited to quick, timing shots around the basket.

[zzaj]

So hard to win in Denver. I was REALLY expecting a loss.

Only players with somewhat reasonable games tonight were Simons and Swanigan--everyone else seemed like the elevation got to them. I truly hope Stotts doesn't put Mario ahead of Hoard in the rotation now that Little is out.

As always, how a team rebounds after a loss is a big barometer of where the team is actually at. I look forward to the San Antonio game. That's a big game if the Blazers want the 8th seed.

[DaVoiceMaster]

Horrible game all the way around. No one had a decent game, let alone a good game. Guys missing lay-ups and point blank shots. It was not meant to be. There was no answer for Jokic. I also thought the ref's took a really long time to find their whistles tonight. I dont know how much of a difference it would have made cuz the Blazers probably would have missed their free throws, as well.

[d-train]

Yeah, the good news is it only counts as 1 loss.