Recap: Blazers' mistakes give a win to the Knicks, but individually they look promising

After a breakdown of defense and some miscommunication on offense, the Knicks defeated the Blazers yesterday afternoon in Summer League play, 71 to 69.

The horrible sequence of events that ended the game—which  led to the Knicks scoring a crucial field goal in the last thirty seconds of the last quarter—contained much that was typical of the Blazers’ performance.

The Knicks had the ball to inbound with 51 seconds to go, the score tied 69-69.  There was time for a good defensive effort and a good push to take the lead.  Just then, however, Cleanthony Early inbounds the ball, Will Barton follows it with his eyes, and his man makes a backcut behind him to the basket.  Barton chases him down, forces a missed layup, but no one is there to get the rebound.  New York grabs it, resets, swings the ball to the wing, and through a strange poorly set screen ends up getting a floater.

After the Blazers get the ball back, a great pass inside by Barton produces only a poor attempt at a layup by Freeland.  The Knicks get the ball back, hurl it upcourt, have a chance to put the game away, but mercifully miss the layup.  Barton grabs the ball and pushes downcourt as fast as he can, and rather than put up a floater himself with four seconds to go kicks the ball out from the top of the key to Bobby Brown on the wing.  Brown’s back leg, however, is out of bounds when he catches it, and with that last turnover the game is effectively over once the Knicks inbound the ball.

Turnovers aplenty, redeeming passing, bad defense, bad luck, good luck, poor decisionmaking.  It is a strange and sloppy mix of all of these things that we saw throughout the game, and not getting them all more in order--or eliminating some of them entirely as game-determining factors--is what cost the Blazers the win.  One can’t say that the Knicks distinguished themselves in any great way: the Blazers handed the game to them as much as they achieved victory.

But there were good signs in all this for Blazers fans nevertheless.  Most of these things can be tightened up with further play.  The 20 turnovers that the Blazers made throughout the game were devastating, but that is something we might well expect in such an early game.  While these guys have been practicing continually, they haven’t been playing against opponents for a few weeks, and that’s enough to get things out of rhythm, even among the veteran starters.

That’s of course the disturbing thing: one would think that the passing would be crisp and accurate among people who have played with each other now for a years and then some.  Defensively, we would expect better communication than what was visible out there.  In the first half the Blazers defense was excellent, but it fell apart in the second, perhaps just because of fatigue.  This, though, as well as turnovers, can mostly be explained by the nature of Summer League play in general, which is fast-paced and hectic.  In the end they are disappointing to see, but not worrying really in the long term.

The great news, in other words, is that these errors were all things that were to be expected, really, from a team in Summer League: the more important thing is that the players individually looked very good.

Will Barton, first and foremost, looks excellent.  He looks to be in great shape, a bit more meaty, and--this is the most promising thing--quicker than ever.  He's very, very fast, and isn't afraid, while he's running the point, to use this speed and push the offense.  Most impressive however was his three-point shooting: he dropped one on the Knicks in the first half and went up confidently.  He handles the ball well (of all the turnovers in the game, he was only responsible for two), and is absolutely wonderful on the fast break.  His eye for passing seems to have improved: he was spotting holes in defenses and passing lanes that better passers only usually see, and was great at threading the needle to get the ball through to open cutters.  The passes themselves weren’t always as accurate as possible, but the court vision seems to have improved significantly.  Defensively, he still seems to be struggling.  He still had difficulty getting through screens, and would get tripped up either by not seeing them coming or getting hammered too hard by them and being bounced around.  Guarding the heavier Giannis Antetoukounmpo, he nevertheless managed to neutralize him by staying in front of him well: he didn’t get blown by at all when it was just one-on-one. In the end he had 11 points, 3 assists, and 7 rebounds.

Thomas Robinson, despite some glaring errors that most of the press has focused upon—his missed reverse jam in particular, which was just a mess—looked amazing.  There is a great improvement in his shot and in his confidence in taking it.  He went 7 for 10 over the course of the game.  It looks very, very different, and he has obviously been working to change it up.  Now it has a very, very high arc—like that of Aldridge—something it didn’t have before.  The change is radical: he’s now able to get a shot off higher and put it up with less fear of what will happen to it once it leaves his fingers.  He took several long twos from the top of the key and they all splashed in.  It looks like the Blazers will be putting him in as a sub for Aldridge and will have him do similar things: this role was perhaps slated to be that of a bigger man—like Hawes—but Robinson is showing himself worthy of it.  Together with 5 freethrows (out of nine taken), he scored 19 points and pulled down seven rebounds.

C.J. McCollum impressed in his sheer ability to get to the hoop and draw fouls: something Damian Lillard did very successfully last year and something that the Blazers are obviously hoping to replicate in their bench lineups.  Usually someone who will settle for a three, he took it to the basket repeatedly, almost every time he got the ball, and showed a nimbleness getting around people in the paint that was wonderful to see.  On defense he is also quick: nothing too impressive here or different, really, in his play than what we have already seen.  He went 4 for 11 shooting twos and was 1 for 4 in threes.  He scored 16 points and had 2 assists.

So while the team wasn’t quite playing well, individually there was a lot that was promising in this first Summer League game.  The Blazers play the Rockets today at 5:30 PST.  Meyers-Leonard will not play for the second straight game with a shoulder injury, but it will be exciting to see whether these lapses are tightened up and whether any of the rivalry that has developed between the two teams over the last year carries over into these Vegas games.