The Portland Trail Blazers will face the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 1 of the 2020 NBA Playoffs series on Tuesday. Normally when the Blazers enter the playoffs, we do a huge statistical rundown of the teams involved, comparing likely advantages and disadvantages. 2020 isn’t quite the same. We’re hampered by three factors:
- With the return of Jusuf Nurkic and Zach Collins, the “Bubble Blazers” are wholly different than their prior regular-season selves. There’s no good way to get an overarching statistical look at them. Factoring in the whole season would imbalance the numbers towards the first 66 games, but the final 9 provide too small of a sample size to be meaningful.