1. Portland Trailblazers: Most people agree that the Blazers are loaded with talent and that they are the likely up-and-coming team of the next decade. What there is some disagreement about is how quickly Portland will arrive and how high they will ascend. The Blazers looked quite good look last year. They won 54 games and had the expected record of a 56-win team. In terms of how they did it, the Blazers had the slowest pace in the NBA last year but also had the most efficient offense behind Brandon Roy, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Travis Outlaw. In fact, virtually none of the top rotation players shot poorly. Portland’s top seven offensive players all had effective field goal percentages above .528% and Aldridge was solid at .486% as well.
Defensively, the Blazers do have some room improve. They were a decent 13th overall but one could certainly envision that a healthy and presumably improving Greg Oden might be able to positively effect that facet of the team. This also seem like a good point to stop and see where Oden is in his development. He was clearly more raw than other great centers were as rookies. But Oden was only 21 and showed some promise in his rate stats. So, let’s see what the other centers were doing at a similar age:
