Forget about the Portland Trail Blazers’ horrid performance at the foul line Saturday night. Stuff happens. But what you need to do is take a look at one more horrific defensive effort, something that is becoming a trademark of the team’s season.

The pick and roll. Simplest play in basketball. Easiest to stop for most teams, too. Certainly the Charlotte Bobcats had no trouble handling Portland’s pick and roll. None. But, wow — the Blazers are humiliating themselves as a professional basketball team by the way they’re defending the pick and roll.

You can pick out moments of that game that make you shake your head in amazement. Switching on all those picks leaves Portland with impossible matchups. How about Greg Oden’s sixth foul? What on earth is he doing out on the wing trying to defend Gerald Wallace, a small forward, one on one? How about one of the final plays in overtime when Blazer broadcaster Mike Rice — you can tell as an old coach he’s just biting his tongue about the whole situation — says confidently, just as Charlotte is setting yet another high pick and roll: “Well, (the Blazers) won’t switch it this time, not in this situation.”

But sure enough, there the Blazers go, switching on another pick and roll, leaving LaMarcus Aldridge to futilely trail a point guard, Raymond Felton, down the lane. Felton missed the shot but because Aldridge was chasing him, the ‘Cats controlled the offensive rebound.

Maybe, for some readers, this is too complicated. See, when a guard has the ball and a bigger player sets a pick for him, the defender needs to “show” on the pick just long enough for the guard’s defender to get back and cover the guard. If you simply switch defensive assignments it leaves the big man defending the guard and the guard defending the other big man. Either one is not workable. So you usually don’t switch the pick and roll, unless the players defending it are approximately the same size.

In the overtime, Charlotte scored on two consecutive dunks (did you see Rudy Fernandez and Joel Przybilla having some heated conversation after the second one?), a wide-open three-pointer and a layup down the stretch, while Portland had nothing but Brandon Roy or Travis Outlaw trying to beat their defenders off the dribble — or pitching it out to Rudy Fernandez for a three-pointer.

I know you’re tired of reading this (hell, I’m certainly tired of writing it) but you just can’t play defense this way and have a reasonable chance to win against good teams. With a better defensive scheme — and the same players it has right now – this team would already have three or four extra wins this season. I don’t care what your lineup is or who you trade for or what your offensive philosophy is. Doesn’t matter.

You can’t win big in the NBA unless you play better defense than this. And it requires a system, an understanding, of how situations are handled, as a team. This isn’t a breakdown of individual players, it’s a team-wide problem. And until it gets solved, this team is just spinning its wheels.

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