Pick and roll.
Pick and roll.
Pick and roll.
Pick and roll.

and lastly,

Pick and roll.

but I gotta say I don’t think this is how you beat the Blazers. I don’t think an opposing coach is going to say the key to beating the Blazers is rebounding, meaning, I don’t think a coach is going to focus on that when preparing his team to face Portland.

Sure, any coach worth his salt is going to tell his team that the Blazers rebound the ball well, especially on the offensive end, but merely fighting for rebounds isn’t going to change the tide of the game. A similar stat, for me at least, is that Portland is 27-2 when they score 100 or more points and, therefore, 10-20 when they don’t. “Play good defense” is not something that changes the outcome of a game. We’ve got to look deeper. We’ve got to understand why Portland does well when they score or rebound a lot.

So, yes, out rebounding Portland and not letting them score 100 points should result in a win for the other team, but they’re working on something else in order to accomplish that.

From what I’ve seen when I watch games the keys to beating Portland are:

Encourage 1 vs. 1 offense from the Blazers (ex. overplay passing lanes)
Play physical
Effective doubles on Roy and Aldridge, make someone else beat you
Get into the paint (either quick guards or pick and rolls), get the bigs in foul trouble
Don’t give the Blazers easy buckets because they don’t force turnovers or get fastbreak points
Make the extra pass, the Blazers don’t rotate well

I’m sure there are more, but these are the ones that popped into my head

(where’s the dramatic prairie dog when you need him?)

maybe the rebounding correlates to their intensity. When they’re grabbing boards, they’re boxing out their men. When they’re boxing out their men, they’re probably contesting their shots as well. Its a bit demoralizing on a play like the Pacers’ 2nd to last try tonight when the opponent grabs offensive board after offensive board and stays alive. When they sink one of those 3rd/4th chance attempts, it is psychologically draining. Our guys are young and that’s one of the pitfalls of inexperience. With time they’ll learn that you have good days and bad days on offense, but your defense is entirely a reflection of your effort and its something you can rely on night in and night out. You’ll always be a net positive if you dont have any negatives (i.e. defensive lapses).

We have a couple games where we killed our opponent on the boards, actually by 20+ in one game, but we only won by about 10 points. If you convert half of a 20 board advantage into scores you win by 20 not by 10. The Blazers clearly have other areas they need to improve on.
I think one of them is playing hard the entire game. We have the unique ability to grind our opponent. But we need to play 10 deep to do this. And we need to do this because our talent is not condensed into 2 or 3 players, but spread out. Player to player comparisons against some teams will show that we have less talent. But this is flips as we go deeper into our bench. We need to come out play hard every single minute.
I hope the San Antonio game taught us this lesson.

We even tend to get out rebounded! (GS and IND.)

Why? Is it because the Blazers practice classical basketball to drill the right way into the guys?

Perhaps Nate should have the starters go against Bayless, Sergio, Rudy, Outlaw and Frye/Randolph to prep for these games?

It just seems like without Roy’s heroics, some great individual performances outside the team concept, and their little guys winding down late and missing, we don’t win these games.

Counting on JJ to miss that 3 is just too much!

And still Portland is 38-22

they have no chance