The Blazers Punched Their Ticket To The Second Round, And Now They Get To Face The Warriors

PORTLAND — It wasn’t pretty, but the Portland Trail Blazers closed out their improbable first-round series against the Los Angeles Clippers Friday night with a nail-biting Game 6 win in front of a raucous Moda Center crowd. Utterly demoralized by injuries to key players and facing the prospect of elimination, the Clippers put in a gutsy effort and even withstood a few final physical blows before all was said and done.

It was anything but an easy win for the Blazers, who didn’t come storming out of the gates with the type of urgency you might expect from a team given the opportunity to finish off a comically-undermanned opponent on their home floor, but then again, their sluggish start was more or less emblematic of their efforts throughout the series. That’s a legitimate concern going into their quarterfinal showdown against the defending champs, but more on that later.

Friday was a bear of game that featured 19 lead changes and 10 ties and refused to be decided until the closing seconds. And quite fittingly, it didn’t happen in dramatic fashion with an instant classic, highlight-worthy game-winner, but rather with a defensive stop, an offensive rebound, and a small handful of free throws.

“It was a grind-it-out game,” Terry Stotts said of his team’s victory. “It’s not going to be a beautiful 48 minutes. What I have a problem with is, if you don’t score, it’s considered ugly basketball. When two teams are really competing and playing hard and defending, to me that’s a thing of beauty as well. So it’s not always about scoring points and shooting a high percentage.”

Indeed, the Blazers didn’t shoot the ball well at all in their opening round series against LA, something they almost certainly cannot afford as they move on to face the Warriors’ swarming defense in the next round. Going into Game 6, they were just a hair over 40 percent from the field and hovering around 31 percent from behind the arc, and superstar point guard Damian Lillard was at the center of that drought as he had converted just 34 of his 94 attempts (36 percent) through five games. Much of that was due to LA’s suffocating traps on Portland’s backcourt tandem the moment they stepped across halfcourt.

What’s disconcerting about that for Blazers’ fans is the fact that Lillard more less resigned himself to that reality this series. He lived up to that enormous potential of his in a total of just two games, one of those being Game 6 on Friday, and that was partially because the Clippers more or less abandoned their tactic of blitzing the Blazers’ guards, allowing Lillard significantly more airspace to maneuver. And to his credit, he was much more aggressive early in this game, too, attacking his defenders off the dribble and generally looking for his shot. It was his best start through all six games as he went off for 14 points in the opening quarter on 6-of-11 shooting from the field and 2-of-4 from downtown.

In the end, it was perhaps his most Lillard-like performance of the series as he led all Blazers with 28 points while going 4-of-9 from behind-the-arc.

“I was really proud of what our team did tonight. Obviously, they were undermanned, but they came out and competed,” Lillard said. “We talked about what they did in the regular season when they didn’t have guys, going to Utah and winning, competing with OKC. We knew that they could come in here and win this game just like we did Game 5, so I was really happy with the way we executed down the stretch. We didn’t panic when they put up a fight for us. We did the things necessary to win the game.”

To say the Clippers came out to compete would be an understatement. The game was deadlocked at 24-24 after one as every Blazer except Lillard suffered through tepid shooting, especially from the three-point line where they shot just 2-of-10 overall. It didn’t get much better in the second quarter, and the Blazers found themselves clinging to a narrow 50-48 margin heading into halftime behind just 40 percent shooting overall, including 25 percent from long-range.

On the opposite end, Jamal Crawford and Jeff Green were the only two Clippers keeping their bedraggled team aloft, Crawford almost single-handedly so as he blew up for 22 first-half points on 7-of-10 from the field. Just as they were starting to get a jolt from Austin Rivers, his evening was paused abruptly midway through the first quarter when he collided with Al-Farouq Aminu and caught a nasty, yet inadvertent, elbow to the face.

As if the Clippers needed anymore injuries.

Rivers left the game and was taken to the locker room, where he got 11 stitches (!!!), but would later return to action and leave an indelible mark on this game, finishing with 21 points on 8-of-19 shooting and making huge plays down the stretch that helped keep the Clippers’ hopes alive until the final buzzer. Both his coach-slash-dad and his teammates were quick to heap on the praise after the game.

“It was awesome,” Doc Rivers said about his son’s performance. “You know. He’s bleeding every timeout. It looked like a boxing match for him. He’s a baller. He likes playing basketball, and so does our team.”

“I’ve been so proud of Austin,” Jamal Crawford later added. “He probably takes more stuff outside of the locker room than any of us because of his dad. I don’t even cuss – I’ve never cussed in a press conference – but he played his ass off.”

Playing with just one eye, Rivers was an absolute menace all night long. That, coupled with the fact that the Blazers never quite looked poised to really pull away and win this game decisively should cause no small amount of unease among the Blazer faithful in terms of their team’s chances against the Warriors. Had Game 6 turned out a different way – and it most certainly could have if Crawford hadn’t been an inch or two wide on his final attempt – we’d be characterizing it as a categorically uninspired effort by Portland in their most important moment of the season heading back to LA for a deciding Game 7. Yikes.

In fact, a lot of the Blazers’ deficiencies were on full display down the stretch when they got out-hustled, out-rebounded, and reverted to unimaginative, one-on-one basketball on a couple of key possessions late in the fourth quarter. A rosier way to look at it is that the Blazers fought and clawed their way to a series-clinching win and made the right plays when it counted most, which in many ways might be the best perspective just for the sake of sanity.

But that masks some difficult truths about their performance in Game 6. It can’t be emphasized enough that the Blazers just barely edged out a severely-depleted Clippers squad. Yes, LA deserves credit for never giving up and playing their hearts out and all that, but still, it should’ve never been that close. It was essentially the same story in Game 5 as they came out listless and unfocused and couldn’t put the Clippers away until late in the fourth.

That type of play will simply not cut it against a team like the Warriors, even minus the reigning MVP. Just look at how comprehensively the defending champions dismantled the Houston Rockets in the first round. It’s a reality Lillard, at least, claims to know well.

“We thought this team was tough without CP and Blake, but that’s a championship team,” Lillard said about matching up against Golden State. “Even without Steph, they’re still a championship team, so we got to keep our mind right, come out and compete and play together. We can’t be worried about who’s not out there because we just watched them beat Houston by 25 twice without Steph. So we just gotta keep improving on the things we’ve done, and we’ll be locked in for that series.”

McCollum, who chipped in 20 points on 7-of-16 shooting in Game 6, went on to talk more specifically about what his team will need to accomplish to stand a chance against the Golden State juggernaut.

“I think they do a great job of scoring in bunches,” McCollum said. “They did that every game we played. They went on a run, whether it was the third quarter, second quarter, or to start the fourth quarter. They go on a 12-2 run, 14-4 run, or Klay hits three or four threes in a row or something, Steph gets going. You got to kind of limit their runs and their opportunities that way, and that’s how you keep the game within reach.”

For Lillard, it’ll be a little more personal as a playoff series against the Warriors will be something of a homecoming for the Oakland native.

“First of all, the opportunity to get to play against the best team in the league, that’s the thing I’m most excited about. Having another challenge where people are going to say we don’t have a chance. That’s the most fun part of it for me. And second, being able to play in front of my family and friends. Since college, they haven’t been able to see me play a lot. To be able to come home and play on the highest stage against the best team in the league, there’ no greater feeling, and I’m really excited about it.”

The Blazers love to pull the underdog card, and why not? It’s been a big part of their identity all season long and one of the more compelling narrative threads weaving its way through the first round of the playoffs. It also sort of gives them an out if/when they fall to the Warriors since nobody expected them to make it this far anyway.

The question now is, what constitutes a victory in the second round? Do the Blazers have what it takes to maybe steal a win or two at home like they did against Los Angeles? Can we expect them to be that much more efficient and consistent in terms of productivity and effort against a much more formidable opponent? Basically, can we expected Portland to pose a real threat to Golden State’s back-to-back title aspirations?

Granted, this Blazers team was responsible for the most shocking and impressive win against the Warriors this season with a 32-point trouncing back on February 19 when Lillard went supernova for a career-high 51 points. But that was the regular season, and is there any question the Warriors won’t have that humiliation in mind heading into Game 1 Sunday? The Warriors won their other three regular-season matchups against the Blazers rather decisively, by the way.

How will Portland handle a more sophisticated offense, a stifling defense, and a vastly superior bench unit? Can the Blazers’ backcourt duo of Lillard and McCollum finally find some consistency even in the face of what promises to be an even more imposing onslaught?

We’ll get our answers once the series tips off in Oakland on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. ET on ABC.

Odds and Ends:

It’s not as if you really need to heckle DeAndre Jordan while he’s shooting free throws, but we’ll take this one.

And this…

Don’t tell Lillard he doesn’t try on defense.

C.J. has one of the prettiest and deadliest step-backs in the league:

Gerald Henderson has been mostly a nonentity this series, but you never know when he’s going to come out of nowhere for filthy putback slam.

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