Stotts’ Blazers are going to run, launch a lot of threes

There were a lot of shrugs and even some eye rolls when Portland said they were going to hire Terry Stotts as head coach — this is a guy who has had two head coaching jobs before and his career winning percentage is well below .500. Another recycled coach.

But that’s not entirely fair — winning in the NBA is about talent on the roster and his previous teams didn’t have much. Neither does his new team right now. Trail Blazers are rebuilding. They have a couple nice pieces but they are not going to be contenders. If the Blazers had hired Phil Jackson they still wouldn’t have been very good this year.

But with Stotts they might be fun to watch.

At his introductory press conference, Stotts talked about having a team that plays an up-tempo game, moves the ball and launches threes. Here are his quotes, via the fantastic Blazers Edge.

“Three-point shooting, I’m a big believer in three-point shooting, to space the court. Between Nic [Batum], Wes [Matthews] and Luke [Babbitt], the young players improving their three-point shooting, I’m excited about that. I do want to play at a pace.

“I’m a big believer in trusting the pass, I want to push it up — not for crazy shots — but I want to push it up, if we’ve got a good one, take it. If not, move the ball around. Part of my offensive philosophy, and we did this with Dallas when we won the championship, is trusting the players to make good decisions. Giving them a freedom to play within a structure and to make basketball plays.”

It’s a trend in the NBA, something that Mike D’Antoni brought to the forefront — letting players create outside of organized plays. In today’s NBA with detailed video scouting, plenty of advanced scouts, and with a lot of teams running similar sets, team defenses know what is coming. If you let a defense get set, they will make it much harder to score. But push the ball up and start to create before the defense sets, force mismatches, get good ball movement and some shooters to space the floor and you can get good looks earlier in the clock.

Stotts also knows he does have some good players to work with.

LaMarcus Aldridge is a stud. He’s an All-Star performer. Hopefully I’ll be able to use him in a lot of similar ways that we used Dirk Nowitzki. Damian Lillard had a terrific Summer League. He’s going to give the Blazers a pick-and-roll game they haven’t had in recent years.

The Blazers are a couple years and a couple players away from winning a whole lot of games. And we’ll see how Stotts pans out. But it sounds like they could be a fun offensive team to watch play night after night. A young team that is going to have some freedom and get improve as time goes on.

That’s something that can be fun to watch for Blazers fans.