Bad Times In Oakland For The Trail Blazers – 7 Key Takeaways

Wednesday, May 04, 2016

Jared Wright, Oregon Sports News

Two games in Oakland. Two crushing losses.

The Portland Trail Blazers, fresh off an exhilarating series victory over the Los Angeles Clippers, were treated to a dominating beat down in Game 1 and a deflating fourth-quarter mugging in Game 2 by the Golden State Warriors.

The final scores look similar, but the way the Warriors won those games couldn’t be more different. Ominous news for the Blazers as their struggle against the defending NBA champions shifts to Portland. (I hope Brian Anderson, the play-by-play man for TNT last night, never says the phrase “Moda Magic” again in his life. Use Rip City, or some cutesy allusion to it. Do your damn homework, Brian!)

Seven things to point out about the Blazers’ unsuccessful trip to the Bay Area:

1. Dominance Comes in Multiple Guises: In Game 1, the Warriors jumped on Portland from the get-go, and never let them breathe. They rode Klay Thompson’s 18-point first quarter (against 17 points for the entire Blazers team) to a huge early advantage that the Blazers couldn’t overcome. Thompson’s scoring and the Warriors’ stifling defense was the recipe for the kind of start that buried the Blazers.

Last night, the script was flipped. This time it was Portland that got out to a large double-digit lead, as they made all the shots and the Warriors couldn’t throw it into the Bay from Alcatraz. As the second and third quarters went on, the Blazers got timely scoring from role players and an explosion from Damian Lillard, and they took an 11-point lead into the fourth after Lillard capped off his eruption with a three-pointer that had to impress even Stephen Curry, the MVP who was out with a knee injury.

After all that, it seemed like Golden State just flipped a switch, got their true game faces on, and stopped playing around. That Klay + defense = victory formula was employed late in Game 2, to devastating results; with 4:44 remaining in the fourth quarter, the Warriors had outscored the Blazers 20-8, seizing a lead they wouldn’t relinquish. The final tally in the fourth ended up being 34-12, Warriors. Yeesh.

None but the most delusional of Blazermaniacs ever thought the Blazers could, somehow, defeat Golden State in a seven-game series. Let’s be honest. However, Game 2 was very much in reach for Portland. Unfortunately, the Warriors reached into their bag of tricks, displayed the mental toughness that separates champions from wannabes, and just wiped the Oracle Arena hardwood with the Blazers.

Valuable learning experience for Lillard, CJ McCollum, and the rest of the young players on the Blazers. This one will sting for a long time, though.

2. Strength in Numbers: That slogan, adorning every piece of merchandise the Warriors franchise has pumped out since the playoffs began, isn’t just some flowery marketing thingy designed to make a butt-ton of cash. It is a credo that this team lives and breathes by, and one that will have to see them through any potential series with the San Antonio Spurs.

As evidence, I present to you Festus Ezeli. The backup big man for Golden State didn’t play in Game 1, and barely saw time on the court in the first-round series against the Houston Rockets. So when coach Steve Kerr put him in during the latter stages of the third quarter, it was a slight surprise at that time, though looking back on the game, Kerr’s reasons for making that move became clear.

Andrew Bogut, the starting center, played an ineffective 16 minutes. He had a couple nice defensive plays, but he was a legitimate hindrance to his own team; he finished with a -13 last night. He lacks the foot speed to help on pick-and-rolls featuring Lillard, and Dame took advantage with the most space he’s had to shoot from since January.

Then Marresse Speights, a big man with a scorer’s mentality, came in. Like Bogut, he had a couple nice plays on defense, but he sucked on the end of the floor he’s paid to be good on. After shooting 0-4 (including airballing a horrible three-point attempt) and committing an offensive foul in four minutes, he was yanked. He didn’t play again.

Ezeli, meanwhile, was the jolt of energy that started the Warriors’ comeback. He was everywhere, funneling defenders towards Draymond Green’s help defense (and changing shots himself), setting bone-crunching screens to get Thompson free from Blazer defenders, and finishing lobs from Green with thunderous dunks. He went 4-4 for eight points and six rebounds in just over 12 minutes of action, which were the most important 12 minutes of the Warriors’ season so far.

Overall, the Blazers played nine guys (their usual rotation so far in the playoffs has been eight), while Golden State played 11. At this point in both teams’ development and their respective places in the league, Golden State just has more options at their disposal then Portland does, even without Curry.

3. That First Half Though: Leading the defending champs by eight, in a building they rarely lose at, while shooting 51% and 7-14 from three, is pretty good.

Whatever happened after, that first half was as good as the Blazers have played this season. Sustaining that kind of effort through the second half is the next step in their evolution.

4. No Trails Blazed to The Rim in Game 2: The Blazers trumped the Warriors in both three-point field goals (13 to eight) and three-point percentage (43% to 33%). They also had the advantage in fast-break points, 19 to eight.

The one trend that really worries me is points in the paint. Golden State doubled the Blazers’ total, with 56 of the Warriors’ 110 points coming in the painted area. The Blazers had just 28.

While it’s very uncharacteristic for the Warriors to be beaten in the three-point game, the parade the Blazers let them make to the rim rendered the three-pointer unnecessary. Portland needed jumpers from all areas of the floor to build their lead and maintain it, but when the jumpers didn’t fall and they had to go into the paint, Golden State was ready. Ezeli and Green and everybody else mucked up the area around the rim, causing Mason Plumlee to lose the ball on several plays and for the others to get swarmed. Green had four blocks last night, and I’d bet that all four came in the fourth quarter.

It might be too much to ask of the Blazers, a below-average defensive team, to clean that up, but that won’t stop them from making the effort. The Warriors might be on another level, but getting doubled up in points in the paint cannot be excused, and they know it.

5. Oracle Arena is Crazy Loud: Even before the Warriors were setting records and winning championships, they had a loud and proud fan base, many of them willing to make the traffic-clogged drive from their very expensive middle-class domiciles in San Francisco to Oakland to watch the Warriors play. For the last several years, that crowd has reached levels of noise and insanity that rivals the heights of Blazermania, or the early-2000s crowds in Sacramento’s Arco Arena.

What’s most surprising about this is, unlike Portland or Sacramento, the Warriors play in a huge sports market. With two football teams, two baseball teams, a hockey team, and innumerable college sports both major and minor to follow, the Bay Area is the most oversaturated sports market not named New York or Los Angeles. And yet, Golden State not only sells out that aging heap of concrete regularly, but do so despite the traffic.

The Bay Area has always been a strong hoops market, though. Even when the Warriors sucked or were mediocre, there were always a hard core of fans willing to come to Oracle, hoping against hope that one day, their team could again reach the exalted heights achieved in the 1970s, despite multiple failed top draft picks, bad signings, and players with serious character issues.

Sound familiar? That’s the existence of every Blazer fan these days. The Warriors are getting to live the dream, a dream taken away from us the instant Greg Oden had knee trouble.

From a Blazer fan’s perspective, it’s easy to root for the Warriors not just because of the camaraderie the players have, nor because they have guys that you’d want your own sons to take as role models. It’s easy to root for the Warriors because the fan bases and franchises are so similar.

When they move into their new arena in San Francisco, it’s likely they’ll have a couple more banners to hang up there. And it couldn’t happen to a better group of people…except the Blazers and their fans.

6. Damian Lillard, Offensive and Defenseless: Dame had himself a hellacious third quarter, single-handedly extending the Blazers’ halftime advantage with the kind of shooting display the Warriors faithful could definitely appreciate; after all, they see it every night Steph Curry takes the floor. He finished with 25 points, six assists, and shooting 6-11 from three. The failure of the Blazers to win this game shouldn’t be pinned on him, you’d think.

Except they should.

It’s not just because he’s the team’s leader and best player. Everyone in that role gets the lion’s share of the credit and blame for how their team performs. Hell, Dame will tell you himself: he’s the guy, and that’s how things work.

Lillard’s defensive deficiencies were highlighted in both games in Oakland, in painful ways. Whether it was Leandro Barbosa blowing by him like it’s 2005 again, or Shaun Livingston using his six-foot-seven frame to post up the six-three Lillard, or whichever player Lillard switches onto (like Draymond Green) abusing him at the rim, he got picked on pretty badly.

It was like watching an eighth-grader and his buddies target his sixth-grade little brother with impunity. The little guy would try his hardest, but the guys he was guarding were too tall, too strong, and too skilled for him to stop.

There isn’t a realistic way to help Lillard out, not against this team. Portland coach Terry Stotts is stashing Lillard on Harrison Barnes, but that only works for a little bit, and Barnes has the skills to take advantage of Lillard if Kerr chooses to go that route. Dame will just have to try his hardest and pray, which is what he’s doing anyway.

7. Terry Stotts is Awesome: Even though Kerr won Coach of the Year (despite not, you know, actually coaching for half the season) in a close vote over Stotts, you can tell Terry gives no craps at all about it. Indeed, his demeanor lately has been relaxed, or as relaxed as a coach in professional sports can be.

Have you seen his end-of-quarter interviews? Stotts has the look of a man who’s playing with house money, and he knows it. Cracking jokes, being respectful of the challenge the Warriors present while being lighthearted about it, even finding a way to be friendly and accommodating when getting blown out by 20 after the first quarter of Game 1...how can you not like this guy?

Stan Van Gundy, Byron Scott, and even Kerr himself (this season, at least) could use a bit of Terry Stotts’ levity. After all, we are talking about a man that famously said, after the biggest head coaching triumph of his career, “I’m gonna go grab a beer.”

Game 3 is Saturday, at the Rose Garden (then, now, forever).