The Trail Blazers are drowning in the mediocrity of their own making

Success is the NBA’s cruellest Kool-Aid, so sweet in the moment, often so direly bitter just months later.

The Trail Blazers were the best feel good story of last season – ‘La La Land’ 1500 kilometres up the west coast.

44 wins, the fifth seed and an (asterisked) opening round playoff series win followed by a series of honourable losses against the 73-win Warriors meant that Portland had arguably the league’s most fulfilling season outside of Cleveland.

This season, though, they’ve been the NBA’s biggest disappointment.

Such a violent swinging back of the pendulum was unforeseeable. Slight regression after such an improbably strong season seemed reasonable. 18-25 (a 34-win pace for the season) and the league’s third worst defence does not.

That decrepit defence is the reason why the Blazers are on track for ten fewer wins than last season. The offence is actually scoring at a higher rate this season, but the defence has been an abomination, the rare type of disaster that manages to be both a comedy and a tragedy at the same time.

The Blazers are both overmatched and clueless, with severe deficiencies in size and intelligence. Their defence is a house of cards, where the slightest breach, the smallest gust of wind, sends everything to hell.

They are weak almost everywhere, with their famously undersized backcourt and lack of a rim protector making scoring a light training drill for the opposition. Compounding the physical shortcomings is a pervasive, malignant sense of confusion, where often players don’t seem to know the scheme (guys, wait, are we switching or … *open three*).

C.J. McCollum isn’t big or strong enough to deal with any shooting guard who flirts with being an above average scorer. He didn’t have the strength or guile to navigate screens in Portland’s last game against Washington, leaving Bradley Beal acres of space to launch from deep.

Damian Lillard is even more hopeless. The jokes about James Harden’s defence should probably be aimed more at Dame, whose attention on that end wanders like a jock in a German philosophy class who watches the hot girl walk towards the exit.

Long-term, their defensive weaknesses might make Lillard and McCollum untenable as the franchise cornerstone tandem, but the Blazers need to see how they fare with a legitimate rim protector behind them before they make that assessment.

Portland have almost $30 million tied up in the center position this season and no one to deter opponents in the paint. On Monday night, Mason Plumlee was perfectly placed to contest a John Wall drive in transition and literally recoiled in fear as Wall rose up to dunk on him.

Maurice Harkless and Al-Farouq Aminu are Portland’s only reliable defenders and unsurprisingly they’re the two regular rotation players with by far the best net ratings on the team.

When those two hit the bench, that often means it’s Allen Crabbe and Evan Turner time, and whenever either of those two are on the floor the Blazers effectively become the Brooklyn Nets. In case anyone has forgotten, Portland committed $145 million to Crabbe and Turner in the offseason.

Those signings were the rare deals that were unmitigated disasters from the moment they occurred. Turner and Crabbe weren’t worth that much in a vacuum, and they certainly weren’t worth it to Portland, a team that needed a rim protector and perimeter defence.

Thanks to the wonky, top-heavy West, the Blazers still have a loose grip on the playoffs, and their offence makes them the favourite to ‘win’ the eighth seed. But to what end? A bloodbath will follow against the Warriors, and avenues to meaningful improvement are unclear.

Lillard and McCollum seem younger than they are because they came to the league late – they’ll be 27 and 26 this year. Portland’s time is now, which is a problem, because Portland’s time is definitely not now.

A dismal allocation of resources is to blame for the Blazers’ present predicament. In a way, it’s easy to see why they doused themselves in kerosene. After one of the most tumultuous stretches in recent NBA history – Wesley Matthews injuring his achilles tendon followed by his departure that summer alongside LaMarcus Aldridge, Robin Lopez and Nicolas Batum reduced a legitimate contender to a ripped city – Portland were desperate to maintain the good times that unexpectedly came last year.

But locking in a mediocre, hopelessly imperfect and unbalanced core the way they did is like a man whose wife just divorced him marrying the first person he meets on Tinder who isn’t a complete nutcase. It’s nice, it’s warm, it’s understandable – but ultimately you should wait for the right one to come along.

The Blazers didn’t wait. They made a splash in free agency because they wanted to keep the waves rippling. As a result, they’re drowning in the mediocrity of their own making.