Not being much on Hallmark holidays, The Girlfriend and I decided to do something a little different for Valentine’s Day. She hadn’t been to a Blazers game in forever, so we splurged and got tickets to last week’s game against Houston and this week’s game against the LA Clippers. Why not spend a chunk of money and have some fun, we figured? So we hopped aboard MAX and headed to the Rose Garden.
I was excited because I’d lived in Houston for 10 years, and one of my occasional treats was to go to a Rockets-Blazers game at Toyota Center. I’ve been back in Portland for 4 ½ years now, and Luis Scola is the only Rocket left on the team from my sojourn in Hell…er, Texas. What used to be a slow, deliberate, almost plodding team built around Yao Ming is now a young, athletic team without a true superstar. The Rockets are active, energetic, and they move the ball well. It turns out that they’re quite a few things the Blazers aren’t.
Both Houston and Portland went into the game with identical 14-11 records. Neither team has been dominant, but both have had stretches where they’ve played well and at least looked that way. Wednesday was not one of those nights for the Blazers, who made the Rockets look like the second coming of Showtime (wherefore art thou, James Worthy?)
Almost halfway through their schedule, the Blazers have displayed a knack for being consistently inconsistent. There’s no way to tell which Blazer team will show up on a given night. Will it be the team that beat the Thunder in Oklahoma City? Or will it be the team that made Golden State and Sacramento look like NBA champions?
The Blazers have grown accustomed to relying on LaMarcus Aldridge to save them on nights when they’re not clicking. If Aldridge is off, rare is the night when anyone else is able to step up and carry the team. L.A. apprenticed as Brandon Roy’s sidekick and learned his lessons well. Either Roy or L.A. could usually find a way to steady the team on nights when everyone else was struggling. With Roy gone, that responsibility falls solely on Aldridge’s shoulders. L.A. may be an All-Star, but no player not named Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan can carry an entire team on their back.
Halfway through the first quarter, it was clear that none of the Blazers brought their “A” game. Aldridge and Camby played despite having the flu, and no one stepped up to fill the void. Houston won 103-96, though the final score doesn’t really tell the story of the game. The Rockets led at the end of the first quarter and built their lead to 19 early in the third. The Blazers mounted a furious comeback to tie the game at 77 and again at 82, at which point the Rockets went on an 8-0 run and called it a night.
I can handle the Blazers losing. It’s the nature of sports; one team wins, the other loses, and everyone wants to know why. What bothers me is paying $55 a ticket to watch a team that looks like they’ve already played two games that day. We all have bad days at the office, but when you pay NBA prices, you can’t be expected to quietly swallow what the Blazers are serving these days.
Almost halfway into the abbreviated 66-game season, it’s clear the Blazers have some serious holes in the dike. If the season had ended with the loss to the Rockets, Portland would be out of the playoffs. So what’s going on here? Based on what I saw against Houston, it’s difficult to know where to start…but I can give it a shot.
– Portland consistently gets dominated on the boards. Marcus Camby and LaMarcus Aldridge may get theirs, but as a team, the Blazers couldn’t out-rebound a pack of Cub Scouts. Lacking a true center, the Blazers are consistently beaten badly on the offensive boards.
– Because there’s no true center on the roster, the Blazers have no inside game. If the shooters are having an off night, opposing defenses can clog the middle and make the Blazers prove they can score from outside. More often than not, they can’t.
– To say that point guard play has been a liability would be an understatement. No one on the roster can steady the team like Andre Miller, who’s now doing for Denver what he spent two seasons doing for the Blazers. The Raymond Felton experiment has been filled with turnovers, poor shot selection, and an inability to run the offense. Nolan Smith has potential, but expecting a rookie to step into a leadership position and run an NBA offense is unrealistic.
– Nicolas Batum is the team’s only consistent shooter. Wesley Matthews and Jamal Crawford were expected to fill that role, but someone needs to inform their jump shots that the lockout is over. The rest of the team has nights when they couldn’t hit the Willamette River if they were standing on the East Bank Esplanade. Without a shooter to consistently draw the attention of opposing defenses, the Blazers have difficulty creating the space necessary to run their offense. And if Kurt Thomas is taking mid-range jumps shots, trouble can’t be far behind.
– Speaking of Batum, why isn’t he in the starting lineup and playing 40+ minutes a game? There are nights when he’s the only legitimate offensive threat besides Aldridge, yet he spends half of every game on the bench. Batum’s the best athlete on the team; he hustles, plays great defense, and he’s a legitimate three-point threat on most nights. It’s tough to do those things when he’s wearing warm-ups on the bench.
– There are nights when the Blazers simply don’t move on offense. Raymond Felton brings the ball into the offensive zone, gets the ball to LaMarcus Aldridge…and everyone stands waiting to see what happens. Houston moved well without the ball, they passed intelligently and efficiently, and they didn’t wait for their superstar to take a shot…because they don’t have one. They ran the Blazers out of their own gym…and there’s no reason for it.
No team featuring Samuel Dalembert as their starting center should be able to run with the Blazers, yet that’s exactly what happened on Wednesday. No disrespect to Dalembert, but he’s not exactly the Second Coming of Bill Russell, knowhutimean?
The game against Houston was a microcosm of the Blazers’ season. Just short of the halfway mark, it seems clear the current roster is unable to get the team where it wants to be. The question is how to salvage the season and get into the playoffs. Does GM [insert name here when Paul Allen actually hires one] trade one of the team’s expiring contracts? Or does he take the hit this year knowing that come free agency the team will be in a position to upgrade and fill the holes in the roster? The 20,000 GMs who populate the Rose Garden on game nights have ideas, but I’m not sure if anyone at One Center Court does. It’s beginning to look like Kevin Pritchard and Rich Cho might be the lucky ones.
In the meantime, I’m just hoping the Blazers show up when Lob City rolls into town this week.
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