C.J. McCollum began last season playing the best basketball of his life for the Portland Trail Blazers.
Long pigeonholed into the very good but not-good-enough category of a team's second-best player, he broke from that mold over the first 13 games of 2020-21, providing Portland a much-needed sense of upward mobility in the Western Conference. With McCollum clearly leveling up, maybe Damian Lillard and company really were good enough to have a puncher's chance at a championship.
That wide-eyed optimism proved premature. The Blazers were knocked out of the first round of the playoffs by the short-handed Denver Nuggets in six games, and only got there after a furious 10-2 finish to the regular season kept them above the play-in fray. More discouraging than the loss itself was what the particulars of another first-round flameout seemed to further cement: Barring significant personnel changes, Portland wouldn't ever possess realistic title hopes before Lillard ages out of his prime.
The Blazers' bench took the brunt of criticism for that dispiriting loss to Denver, and rightfully so. The starting lineup posted a +47 plus-minus in a series they were outscored by just eight total points. Defense, obviously, was the driving force behind Portland's reserve units getting abused. Who could forget Terry Stotts finally pulling a helpless Enes Kanter from the rotation, only to occasionally guard Nikola Jokic, the newly-minted league MVP, with Carmelo Anthony in crunch-time?
But that glaring problem didn't have to be the difference in the series had McCollum been merely average instead of downright disappointing. Monte Morris legitimately outplayed him on both ends as the season hung in the balance. Austin Rivers did at times, too. In 76 possessions McCollum played without Damian Lillard against Denver, the Blazers' offensive rating was an ugly 96.1, per Cleaning the Glass.
Needless to say, how McCollum finished last season didn't exactly call Lillard's pointed summer demands for personnel upgrades into question. The real one wasn't even if the former's career-best start to 2020-21 was a fluke, but whether McCollum was possibly on the decline just as his three-year, $100 million contract extension kicked in this season.
Chauncey Billups never felt that doubt. Four games into 2021-22, he's entirely unshocked by McCollum's banner beginning to the regular season.
“I'm not surprised,” Billups said after Portland beat the Memphis Grizzlies, McCollum leading his team in scoring for the fourth straight game. “C.J. came into camp in excellent shape this year, and from what I'm told he came in better this year than he's come in in a long time.”
McCollum is averaging 26.8 points, 4.8 rebounds and 3.0 assists per game on 63.4 percent true shooting in the season's early going. If those numbers seem familiar, it's because they're very similar to ones that had McCollum positioned as an All-Star last season before suffering a hairline fracture in his left foot on January 16th.
Remember offseason hand-wringing about Billups supposedly discouraging Portland from prioritizing threes? It was always foolish given Billups' understanding of the symbiotic relationship between paint touches, defensive rotations and open shots from the perimeter, but McCollum has deemed it completely irrelevant by getting back to his pre-injury three-point rate from 2020-21.
He took 55 percent of his shots from beyond the arc before going down last season, a sky-high number that dipped back toward career norms once he returned to the floor in March. McCollum's three-point rate is at 52.5 percent for the time being, a would-be personal peak that should probably increase considering he's blazing nets to the tune of 47.6 percent shooting from deep. Incredibly, he's barely been worse launching off the dribble than off the catch. McCollum enters Friday's action against the LA Clippers shooting 45 percent on pull-up triples, seventh-best in the league among high-volume shooters, per NBA.com/stats.
For all the talk of Portland veering away from a dribble-heavy offense dominated by its star guards, McCollum's shot chart is nearly unchanged save that notable uptick in three-point attempts. He's actually running more ball screens than last season, too, getting slightly fewer shots at the rim. All in all, McCollum is simply playing like a better version of the player he's been for years—or more accurately, a lot like the one that seemed destined for his first All-Star berth last season before injury got in the way.
“C.J. is so just so gifted. He just reminds me of a like 1980s and '90s player, with a 2021 kind of swag,” Billups said. “Crafty, gets to those little areas, he's using both hands around the rim, his mid-range game is really good, his three-ball is really good. It's just a tough matchup, so I'm not surprised. He's always gonna be aggressive; we need him to do that.”
Maybe McCollum sustaining this level of play doesn't get him that long-awaited All-Star debut. The West is still loaded at guard even without upstarts like Ja Morant and Anthony Edwards taking the next step. Surely more meaningful to McCollum than an All-Star appearance anyway? Proving himself as a top-tier second option, and there's no better time or place to do it than when and where he came up well short against the Nuggets.
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