No Nurkic? No problem! The Blazers presciently signed Enes Kanter before Nurkic’s fibular fireworks a few games ago, and he’s basically a one-to-one replacement. Just stick him in the starting lineup, and watch him do the same sort of things.
Now, you might bring up defense. Okay, sure, I can agree with the idea that Kanter simply does not play defense and is not capable of playing defense. And that fact might indicate that he is not really a one-to-one replacement for Nurkic. Fine. But here’s the deal: you can always score more points. If you have a defensive liability on the team, just tell Damian Lillard to take and make a bunch more threes. Boom. Problem solved. Kanter isn’t as much of a sieve on defense if Lillard is scoring 50 a night.
So we’ve got that taken care of, and now there are no more problems. Kanter is the same sort of relentless rebounder as Nurkic, the kind of guy who grabs rebounds that aren’t meant to be grabbed. The kind of guy who takes five layups, bonks them all but snatches all the rebounds, and makes the sixth. Some people might call that statpadding. I call it “playing winning basketball”.
Kanter isn’t really the passer that Nurkic was either (Kanter’s assist rate in his rookie year was INSANELY low, but it has gotten a little better), but again, just tell Lillard to drop more dimes. Or Evan Turner. Boom. Problem solved again. The thing is, it’s seeming like the Blazers were making Nurkic do stuff he didn’t exactly need to do. Like pass and play defense. So it’s fine that Kanter doesn’t do those things, because he does do the important stuff: buckets and rebounds.