The Portland Trail Blazers, as we once knew them, have been torn down.
In each of the last three seasons, Portland has trotted out a starting lineup that has ranked among the top four most used lineups in the entire NBA for that year. Over the last two seasons -- since the Blazers traded for a podcast with Grantland's Zach Lowe that Aminu is likely the starter at small forward. He also insinuaited that McCollum and Leonard could be in the starting mix as well. Throw in the fact that Davis, Plumlee, and Henderson are all coming from situations where they got semi-regular to regular starter minutes, and you've got a conundrum on your hands.
As a possible way to make sense of it all, we here at numberFire have a metric called Basketball-Reference.com's position estimates (to determine at which positions each player has experience playing), here is the optimal starting lineup for the 2015-16 Portland Trail Blazers:
| Player | Position | nF Efficiency |
|---|---|---|
| Damian Lillard | PG | 2.2 |
| Allen Crabbe | SG | -0.1 |
| Al-Farouq Aminu | SF | 0.7 |
| Ed Davis | PF | 2.2 |
| Meyers Leonard | C | 2.3 |
Meyers Leonard (2.3) and Ed Davis (2.2) edge out Mason Plumlee (1.1) as the starting bigs, while Al-Farouq Aminu slots into the small forward spot as expected without much competition. The only real surprise out of the starting five -- since Lillard was a dead lock -- is Allen Crabbe as the starting shooting guard.
In real life, either Gerald Henderson (-0.8) or C.J. McCollum (-0.4) are much more likely to get the nod at the starting two spot, but Crabbe was marginally more efficient on a per-possession basis last season by our metric. Regardless, all three candidates would have a negative impact as part of a league-average lineup and will serve as the weak link in an otherwise surprisingly efficient starting unit.
The Portland Trail Blazers aren't expected to post their third straight 50-win season this year and are likely candidates to fall out of the hyper-competitive Western Conference playoff picture. They've become a bit of an NBA afterthought after several years of moderate success but have admittedly put together a group of young and promising players in the wake of the grand exodus of their former core this summer.
How they decide to deploy and utilize said youth and upside should be one of the most interesting stories to follow coming out of Portland this season.