Trevor Ariza has had way more good games for the Blazers in his short stint there than he ever did for the Kings earlier this season. Just to remind you, his season-high as a King was eighteen points. In nine games with the Blazers, he’s scored more than that three different times. And now I’m trying to figure out how and why this is the case.
The Blazers are injury-ravaged right now, so Ariza might feel a bit more compulsion to contribute since he knows that nobody else on the roster will be able to. On the Kings, he never really was in a position to take many shots, but on the Blazers, everybody is in a position to take a lot of shots.
The more accurate reason that Ariza is thriving in Portland might just be that there’s a huge different in cultures between the two teams. The Kings, despite their best efforts to reverse this trend, still seem to be a place where free-agent talent goes to wither away and die. Meanwhile, we’re seeing player after player step up for the Blazers, and it’s likely that team leader Damian Lillard’s strong personality has a lot to do with that. Basically the only player underperforming there is Mario Hezonja. Everybody else is overperforming in the face of adversity, and that now includes Ariza as well.
I’m not usually the guy who attributes player success to things like “culture” and “leadership”. Those are concepts that I have trouble understanding since I have never been part of a real sports team. But when it comes to the Kings, who are known league-wide as being totally screwed up from top to bottom, any number of individual or team-wide woes can be attributed to the organization itself. So easy! So convenient!