After Trail Blazers starting center Jusuf Nurkic went down with a broken leg just a few weeks before the end of the 2018-19 regular season, most assumed their chances of securing home court in the first round of the 2019 Playoffs were sunk. That didn’t end up being the case, as Portland won seven of their final nine games to secure the four-seed and home court in the first round, where they’d meet the Oklahoma City Thunder.
But without Nurkic, the safe assumption was that Portland didn’t have enough talent to take down the likes of Russell Westbrook and Paul George.