The Trailblazers are a lot harder to beat when Al-Farouq Aminu is hitting a large amount of his catapaulted rainbow threes. This is his season-high in threes, with four, and the three other times he’s done that this season Portland has a record of… 1 win and 2 losses? Okay, well it SEEMS like the Blazers shoul be a lot harder to beat when Aminu is a legit deep threat. The reality is different, but I don’t see why.
Thunder fans are allowed to be salty about this one. It’s not fair that an iffy scorer like Aminu should score 19 in any scenario, and it’s more unfair that he should score 19 in an important playoff game on the road. If I’m a Thunder fan right now (and who says I can’t, for the purposes of this description, identify as one, team fandom is a spectrum), I would have earned the right to go on the internet and dig up those questionable tweets by Aminu as a way of expressing frustration at his unexpected bucket-getting prowess.
If the Blazers can just have one of their role-players per game step up alongside Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum, I bet they can make the WCF. Neither Denver nor San Antonio scare me much right now, neither of those teams has a scorer like Lillard or a Nigerian like Aminu. Though, a Nigerian like Aminu is still technically acquirable, as long as they settle for his brother Alade. Who should totally be in the league right now, if only so I could sometimes make a vid for him and talk about how his brother really sucks.