Portland hunts for an edge. Can they unlock San Antonio's perimeter defense and force role players into clutch three-point opportunities?
The Portland Trail Blazers will kick off their opening-round playoff series against the San Antonio Spurs on Sunday night, and if Saturday’s early slate of playoff games proved anything, it’s that nothing is ever easy this time of year. No matter how big of a favorite a team is, or what seed sits next to its name on the scorebug, the playoffs are a grind. It’s a game of runs, and if a team makes the right run at the right time, it can win any game.
Because of that, playoff basketball becomes a balancing act. The margins for error get smaller, every possession carries more weight, and in the kind of grind-it-out environment where points are harder to come by and scoring totals tend to dip, the details become everything. That’s why being dialed in matters so much in the postseason.
For a team like Portland going up against San Antonio, that means not only trying to shore up its own weaknesses, but also fully understanding what makes the Spurs so dangerous and where there may be even the slightest room to exploit something. And when evaluating San Antonio’s season as a whole, there just aren’t many obvious flaws.
The Spurs won 62 games, finished as one of the top teams in the NBA, and did it despite relying heavily on a young core. It’s easy to point to age and inexperience as reasons a team like that could come up short in the playoffs, but talent often overrides that, and San Antonio has no shortage of it.
Still, if there’s one area Portland may be able to poke at, it could be opponent three-point shooting.
Over the course of the season, the Spurs allowed opponents to shoot 35.2% from beyond the arc, which isn’t exactly a damaging number. That still ranks among the better marks in the league. But when you pair that with the fact San Antonio was more middle of the pack in three-point attempts allowed at 36.9 per game, there are at least some data points that suggest if a team gets up a high volume of threes and converts at a solid rate, there’s a path to putting stress on that defense.
Now, in some ways, that’s true against just about anybody. If you take a lot of threes and make them, you’re probably going to give yourself a good chance to win. But even teams like the Oklahoma City Thunder, who have built a historic defense, are structured in a way that dares opponents to make perimeter shots, especially from role players. The Spurs aren’t all that different in that sense.
With Victor Wembanyama patrolling the paint, San Antonio’s biggest priority is taking away drives, closing off the rim, and forcing primary creators to kick the ball out to players who aren’t always counted on to hit the biggest shots. That means this is going to be a series where Portland’s role players have to step up. Players outside of Deni Avdija are going to have to score.
Look for Toumani Camara and Kris Murray to be key pieces in this series. And while opponent three-point shooting isn’t some glaring weakness for San Antonio, if you’re trying to identify one area where Portland might be able to dig in and create some discomfort, it may be one of the few places to start.