Evan Turner took over color commentary duties from Lamar Hurd on tonight\u2019s broadcast of the Trail Blazers game versus the Washington Wizards. Turner fit in seamlessly next to play-by-play man, Kevin Calabro.<\/p>\n
Always a character, Turner opened the broadcast uttering a couple of Chinese phrases as Calabro noted that Chinese Blazers center, Yang Hansen, will appear at the NBA\u2019s All Star weekend in the Rising Stars game.<\/p>\n
\u201cI been to the Great Wall like four or five times,\u201d Turner said. \u201cIf you go to Beijing\u2013anywhere in China, mention Evan Turner.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s on,\u201d Calabro chimed in.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s on,\u201d Turner said. \u201cYou\u2019re good.\u201d<\/p>\n
The retired NBA forward sounded like a genuine Blazers fan. He quickly adopted the first-person plural personal pronoun, referring to the Portland squad as \u201cwe.\u201d He peppered his commentary with meaningful statistics and the insightful patter of a savvy basketball lifer.<\/p>\n
The Blazers\u2019 broadcasting team was ready to highlight the former Portland wing, playing a bit from 2016 featuring Portlandia actors Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen interviewing Turner on a set made up to look like a cable access show.<\/p>\n
Turner last played for the Blazers in 2019. In a testy, seven game Western Conference semi-final brawl with the Denver Nuggets that year, the Blazers\u2019 forward distinguished himself by flipping the bird at Denver players at the end of game six before scoring 14 points in the decisive game seven, helping to send Portland to the Western Conference Finals.<\/p>\n
Turner will provide color once again Friday when the Portland travels to New York. Here\u2019s hoping the game provides occasion for him to retell the dump truck story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Evan Turner took over color commentary duties from Lamar Hurd on tonight\u2019s broadcast of the Trail Blazers game…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3784],"tags":[7,601,37660,6,687,471,3967,1617],"class_list":{"0":"post-565372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-portland-trail-blazers","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-blazers","10":"tag-blazers-news","11":"tag-nba","12":"tag-portland","13":"tag-portland-trail-blazers","14":"tag-portlandtrailblazers","15":"tag-trail-blazers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115970432713310340","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}