Evan Turner’s game-winning 3 puts bitter end to bad day for Blazers
After losing LaMarcus Aldridge to left thumb surgery before the game and Nicolas Batum to a sprained right wrist during the game, the Portland Trail Blazers really could have used a win over the lottery-bound Boston Celtics to at least salvage something positive from what had been a pretty crummy Thursday.
Man, this really wasn’t the Blazers’ day.
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Holding onto a two-point lead after pressed-into-starting power forward Thomas Robinson split a pair of free throws on the prior possession, the Blazers needed one last stop to escape. And for a second there, it looked like they had it. Portland guard Wesley Matthews darted from the corner to swipe at Boston big man Jared Sullinger’s dribble, knocking the ball loose in the paint and sending Sullinger diving to the floor to retrieve it. In the ensuing scramble, the former Ohio State standout wound up seated and facing the corner from which Matthews had come … and where Sullinger’s fellow former Buckeye, Evan Turner, was standing unmarked.
Spoken with the confidence of a man who rocks an “E.T.” piece.
Sullinger kicked out the pass, Turner hoisted the 3 just over the outstretched arms of the hard-charging Matthews’ flying closeout, and the ball splashed through the net. It might not have been exactly the play that second-year Celtics coach Brad Stevens drew up in the huddle, but it still gave Boston a one-point lead with 1.9 seconds left on the clock.
With Aldridge and Batum out of commission, everyone in the world knew where Portland would look for an answer on its last possession, and that included the Celtics; Damian Lillard couldn’t even get a shot off before the final buzzer sounded, sealing a 90-89 Celtics win.
Turner finished with 10 points on 4-for-9 shooting, eight assists, six rebounds, one steal and four turnovers in 31 minutes in the win, Boston’s first on the road against a Western Conference opponent in nearly two years. Sullinger added 17 points on 8-for-15 shooting, nine boards (four on the offensive glass), one steal and that one big assist in his 28 minutes of work. Avery Bradley led the way with 18 points on 8-for-16 shooting to go with four rebounds and four assists as Boston won for just the second time in its last seven games.
As for the Blazers …
Well, on one hand, you can certainly understand a bit of an emotional letdown from a team that just learned its top scorer and rebounder will be out of the lineup for at least a month and a half. Portland often looked out of sorts on Thursday, shooting a season-low 37.1 percent from the field as a team as Lillard (who needed 23 shots to score his team-high 21 points) and Batum (scoreless on 0-for-6 shooting before he exited, in a disappointing regression after what looked to be a breakout game on Wednesday) were unable to fill the offensive void left by Aldridge’s absence.
Still, Portland led by six with 4:44 left in the fourth quarter. Even shorthanded in the frontcourt on the second night of a back-to-back, that’s a game that you really have to win, especially against a Celtics team that — chock full of well-meaning strivers though it is — is basically being stripped down for parts in the early stages of Danny Ainge’s grand draft-pick-and-trade-exception-fueled rebuild. And especially given, as we noted earlier, the brutal stretch of scheduling the Blazers face over the expected duration of Aldridge’s absence.
Yes, Portland closes out January against Eastern Conference competition, but that includes matchups with the very good Washington Wizards, the finding-their-way Cleveland Cavaliers, the top-five defense of the Milwaukee Bucks and the perpetually engulfed in flames Atlanta Hawks over the next week and a half. It only gets rougher in February, which features meetings with five teams currently in the Western Conference playoff bracket — the Phoenix Suns, Dallas Mavericks, Houston Rockets, Memphis Grizzlies and San Antonio Spurs — and the one team outside the top eight that can put the fear of God in the heart of its opponents, the getting-on-a-run Oklahoma City Thunder.
With a slate like that on the horizon, your leading scorer going under the knife, your do-everything wing both in a months-long funk and dealing with a balky wrist, and two of your top bigs still sidelined, you can’t afford to give away games like Thursday’s. And yet, the Blazers missed 11 of their last 13 field-goal attempts over the final six minutes of the game; Matthews and Robinson both missed free throws in the final 75 seconds that could have given Portland some cushion against a game-winning 3; and they couldn’t finish off their final defensive possession.
“We needed one more play,” Blazers coach Terry Stotts said after the game, according to Joe Freeman of the Oregonian. “And we didn’t make it.”
As a result, Portland falls to 31-13 and drops percentage points behind the 30-12 Grizzlies, who now ascend to the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference behind the rampaging Golden State Warriors. The Blazers are just a half-game ahead of the fourth-place Mavericks, and just 1 1/2 games ahead of the No. 5 Clippers and No. 6 Rockets. Life comes at you fast in the West. Dame and company better find a new normal even faster.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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