Can Portland Trail Blazers Make This a Series Against Golden State Warriors?

The Portland Trail Blazers will be at home, and that’s a start.

Free from the Oracle Arena din, where delirious Golden State Warriors fans revel in triumphing over perceived vulnerability, the Blazers get a chance to steady themselves in Game 3 on Saturday.

Portland was 28-13 at home this season but just 16-25 on the road, with the latter representing the worst mark of any playoff team. To make this a series, the Blazers must hope their familiar confines produce better play, though their survival may depend just as much on foreign concepts.

The Blazers need to adjust, even if they’re not talking that way. 

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“I think that you have to evaluate how much you actually want to change, because of the good basketball we played for a long stretch,” Portland head coach Terry Stotts said after Game 2, per David MacKay of Blazer’s Edge.

Leaning on the status quo will be tempting, particularly after Portland outplayed the Warriors for all but about six minutes of a 110-99 Game 2 loss.

Golden State blitzed the Blazers in the fourth quarter, and it will make its own tweaks, as head coach Steve Kerr explained to CSNBayArea.com’s Monte Poole: “Portland made some adjustments and did some things that bothered us,” Kerr said. “So we looked at those things and talked about the things that we might do differently.”

The same tactics used in the same doses, then, won’t work. And to put it bluntly, there simply aren’t many options available to Portland.

Lineup Juggling: Now With More Crabbe!

When on the court together, the Blazers’ current starting forwards, Moe Harkless and Al-Farouq Aminu, have contributed to a postseason offensive rating of just 97.9 points per 100 possessions. Against a Warriors team that led the league in offense this season, that’s not going to cut it.

Even with Stephen Curry sidelined (the MVP is out for Game 3 as well, per Andrew Perloff of the Dan Patrick Show), Golden State has scored 115.5 points per 100 possessions against the Blazers. That’s more than their league-leading regular-season rate of 112.5.

Though his play has been uneven, and he subtracts from the Blazers’ defensive potency, Allen Crabbe might deserve more time in the starting unit.

Inserting him at small forward would give the first group a shooter who hit 39.3 percent of his treys in the regular season, and the Warriors likely wouldn’t ignore him on the perimeter like they do both Aminu and Harkless.

The worry here is that Crabbe has actually shot a lower percentage from downtown in the postseason than either of his currently starting counterparts. If he’s not making the Warriors pay from deep, his shooting and slightly better skills as a one-dribble facilitator won’t mean much.

And hey, maybe he’s not totally helpless on defense.

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Tossing Crabbe out there is a gamble, but it might be a bigger one to expect Aminu and Harkless to keep shooting like they …

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