Jusuf Nurkic On His Minutes Restriction: 'The Worst Part of It's Over'
Jusuf Nurkic played his best game of the season on Friday night, dropping season-highs of 26 points and 17 rebounds on the Memphis Grizzlies. He also led the Trail Blazers with a +9 plus-minus, evidence of Nurkic's two-way impact on another night his team mostly failed to string together multiple stops.
Nurkic's flubbed, go-ahead layup in the final seconds of Friday's game is getting lots of attention, but hardly detracts from the power, dexterity and confidence he otherwise showed finishing around the rim. He shot 11-of-15 from the field against the Grizzlies, taking advantage of Jonas Valanciunas' absence by abusing smaller defenders in the post and on rolls to the rim.
"It was his best game of the season, that's obvious," Terry Stotts said of Nurkic after the game. "Probably the best thing was offensively he finished around the basket – one of his better finishing nights."
The Bosnian Beast played 29 minutes for a second straight game, too, unleashed after previously notching no more than 25 minutes of court time since his return from injury in late March.
As far as Portland's big-picture hopes go, the loss to Memphis was encouraging because Nurkic scraped the peak he was playing at before suffering that devastating left leg injury two years ago. There's reason to believe he'll have more opportunity to do so again going forward, too, with his minutes restriction nearing an end.
"Obviously as a player you want to be out there as much as possible," Nurkic said. "But I can easily say I want to play as much minutes as I want, but then they come back to me and say, 'We got this. We gotta do this the right way for the playoffs.' I think we have 14, 15 games left in the season. I feel like at this point I want to trust the medical staff, but at the same time I'm just right there to get off the minutes restriction. So, I think the worst part of it's over."
The Blazers' net rating with Nurkic on the floor since he came back from a wrist injury is +6.1, highest among starters and second-best on the team. It's been accomplished mostly on defense, where Portland owns a 106.6 defensive rating – a near-elite number that spikes all the way to 115.6 when Nurkic is off the floor, per NBA.com/stats.
Losers of four in a row and with a 3-9 record in April, the Blazers have fallen a half-game behind the Dallas Mavericks for sixth in the Western Conference. The play-in tournament has never seemed a more likely fate.
Portland's condensed finishing schedule, which includes a whopping four back-to-backs, won't make surpassing Dallas easy. But if Nurkic is really rounding into form and set for a bigger role in the near future, at least the Blazers will have some legitimate room for optimism over the season's stretch run.