The Oklahoma City Thunder came to the Moda Center Wednesday, November 5. The defending NBA champs. 8-0 start to the season. A swarming defense that is once again the best in the NBA. Last season's MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, a savant at getting his defenders to foul him, has given lesser teams fits. And a 16-game winning streak against the Portland Trail Blazers. But the Blazers are different this year. They can beat annoying at its own game.
Basketball is a contact sport. Sure, it isn’t the full-on deliberate brain damage-inducing collision sport that is American Football, but every single play in an NBA game involves players in some form pressing their bodies into the opposing team in hopes of creating some sort of offensive or defensive advantage. One way to create more advantages for teams who are offensively deficient is “pressing,” something this year's Portland Trail Blazers do more than any other team in the NBA.
A “press” is what it sounds like. Instead of letting the offense get to the half court line to set up their play(s), the defending team pressures the opposing ball handler the entire length of the court with hopes of instigating the opponent into turnovers, forcing them to exert more energy, allowing them less time to run their desired offense, and just generally annoy them—or often a combination of all of the above.
Pressing is so effective at youth levels that some coaches wish to ban it. Professional offenses, however, easily create advantages against a press if defenders are out of position. And while the press may tire out opposing offenses, it also leaves the defenders equally without time to catch a breath.
At the highest levels of play, the full court press has been seen more as a gimmick—too high risk, high reward. It's typically been something reserved for desperate attempts at coming back when down big in the final seconds of a game.
Recently this conventional wisdom is shifting. Across the NBA, the press tactic is being used nearly four times as often as it was five years ago. After an era of offensive prowess, the full court press—and hyper intense defense more broadly—is back.
Look no further than the Oklahoma City Thunder, a team who won their title on the backs of one of the best NBA defenses in the past decade, beating the Indiana Pacers, a team themselves leading the NBA playoffs in press percentage. The Thunder’s defense was best in the league in basically every metric (defensive rating, opponents field goal percentage, opponents points in the paint, and even deflections per game). They boasted speed and length at every position to eliminate disadvantages when a defender is forced to switch and guard someone different than they intended. Plus they possessed a seemingly endless well of bench players ready to come on the court with intensity, testing the boundaries of the amorphous definition of a foul. From a defensive perspective, this is playing "aggressive,” but from the offense it’s just “annoying.”
The Golden State Warriors dynasty of the 2010s was defined by three-point shooting and virtuosic ball movement, romantics attempting to strive towards an offensive sublime—Beautiful Basketball. The Thunder’s artistic reaction is ushering in a new era—Brutal Basketball.
The Blazers certainly seem in on the brutalistic reaction. About a month into the season the Blazers utilized the press tactic on 24.5% of defensive possessions, producing one of the best defenses to boot as one of the leaders in forcing the offense to turnover the ball. This, in large part, has led to a relatively warm start.
After a four-year era of being led by the most-arrested-by-the-FBI NBA coach of all time, Chauncey Billups, watching the Blazers lose (likely on purpose), this new team might actually be good. With Tiago Splitter now at the helm, it must seem like a cruel joke to the former coach watching on from his house awaiting trial. The Blazers’ stingy-defense-to-transition-offense identity is just the style Billups emphasized every year since he was hired in 2021. Billups’ feeble pleas to “play fast,” insisting “it’s not going to be optional to play hard defensively,” are the type of preseason cliches that seemed like euphemisms for Young Teams That Suck. These declarations particularly grew stale as the Blazers consistently landed among the worst defenses in the NBA during his tenure.
Saying nothing has changed besides the coach would be an overreach. This summer, the Blazers swapped Anfernee Simons, one of the worst defensive players in the entire league, with Jrue Holiday, a veteran, borderline hall of fame guard perhaps most known in Portland for shutting down Damian Lillard in the 2018 playoffs. And Jrue continues to be the defensive menace scorers hate to play against, but beloved when he’s with the “good guys.” With him, the Blazers can bring out super versatile defensive lineups whether with centers Donovan Clingan and Robert Williams III, or the speedy “small ball lineups” of Jerami Grant, Deni Avdija, Shaedon Sharpe, and NBA All-Defensive player Toumani Camara. Add back in the currently injured, pesky bench guards Matisse Thybulle and Blake Wesley, and the Blazers could make opposing teams’ nights a living hell. At the very least, an unwanted cardio workout.
The season’s first game against the Thunder started out flat for the Blazers, who fell behind 41-21 in the first quarter. It seemed like a 17th straight embarrassment was imminent. Though, the Blazers clawed back with their new signature press defense.
With six minutes and 30 seconds left in the game, Jrue Holiday hit a mid-range jump shot for the first Blazer lead of the game—97-96. Holiday then immediately followed this by picking up last year’s MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander full court. Tired from a full game of sprinting, the defending MVP passed the ball off to his teammate Ajay Mitchell. The Blazers trapped Mitchell just as he crossed the half-court line, baiting him into a backcourt violation. Blazer ball. Holiday responded immediately by hitting his sixth three-pointer of the night to put the Blazers up 100-96. The Thunder tried turning to press themselves, but to no avail. The Blazers held on to win 121-119. Breaking their 16-game losing streak against OKC, and handing the Thunder their first loss of the 25/26 season.
The beauty of this sequence is less in the catharsis for our hometown heroes, and more in how annoying that must have been for OKC fans. Losing in exactly the way they wore down every team before them.
It’s the type of win that had me listing ways the Blazers’ defense could become even more annoying. They could slap the floor. The Blazer tasked with guarding the opposing team’s best player could stop showering a week before a big matchup. In place of shit-talking, they could start singing “Actually Romantic” when the opposition shoots free throws, and utilize the ’90s Adam Sandler baby voice if anyone tries to chat during the game. In 2006, California Berkeley fans put in work, catfishing USC guard Gabe Pruitt with a fake AIM girlfriend named SexyBruinBabe, only to taunt him with the image of his own chat log when the team came to town. Maybe that’s too far, maybe this defense is enough.
Sure, it’s still early in the season. Sure, it’s a small sample size. Sure, the Thunder were missing a few players. Sure, these early injuries could foretell the impending doom of utilizing such a physically demanding style. Sure, it can all come crashing down. But that Wednesday game could also be a peek at fruit beginning to ripen. After one of the worst four-year stretches in the history of the franchise, it’s easy to forget the Blazers are historically one of the better teams. Losing the taste for winning happened quickly.
Now, at the very least, the Blazers have a recognizable identity. Being brutal, being annoying, being the thorn in the side of the opposing team. They’re a chef with a plan, after years of just throwing tomatoes at the wall, hoping it would make sauce. It almost tastes like winning again.
