The Portland Trail Blazers are taking on the Memphis Grizzlies tonight once again for the second game of a back-to-back between the teams. Portland turned around a slow start in their last contest to come away with a 135-115 win last night. The other big news from the game was Scoot Henderson\u2019s return to action, as he came off the bench and played 21 productive minutes.<\/p>\n
The Grizzlies had a massive shakeup at the trade deadline when they dealt Jaren Jackson Jr. to the Utah Jazz for a package containing a couple young players and three first-round picks. That, coupled with an injury bug running through their team, has caused them to likely drop out of the Western Conference Play-In race.<\/p>\n
Portland Trail Blazers (24-28) vs. Memphis Grizzlies (20-30) – Sat. Feb 7 – 7pm Pacific<\/p>\n
How to watch via streaming: BlazerVision in Oregon and Washington; League Pass or NBA TV everywhere else.<\/p>\n
Trail Blazers injuries: Not released yet.<\/p>\n
Grizzlies injuries: Ja Morant, Zach Edey, Brandon Clarke (Out); Rest of report not released yet.<\/p>\n
Shaedon Sharpe\u2019s Injury. Sharpe left the last contest early with a calf injury. No official news has come yet about his status for this game. If he plays, it will be interesting to see if that injury affects him at all. However, if he doesn\u2019t play, the question becomes who replaces him in the starting lineup.<\/p>\n
Henderson played well in his return to action \u2014 11 points, 9 assists and 5 rebounds in 21 minutes \u2014 but may be held to a lower minute total again to ease him back into action. Sidy Cissoko started the second half for Portland and has filled in often this season for injured guards. Him lining up next to Jrue Holiday as the starting guards seems likely and would give the Blazers a defense-focused backcourt to begin the game.<\/p>\n
Giant In The Paint. Donovan Clingan made Memphis\u2019s lack of a center very obvious last night. He snagged 17 rebounds, including 7 offensive. An advantage of that size is difficult for this Grizzlies team \u2014 whose tallest available player is 6\u20199\u201d \u2014 to overcome. Clingan has emerged as one of the NBA\u2019s premier rebounders this season, and being able to leverage that massive size difference throughout the game should give Portland the win on the glass.<\/p>\n
Taking Care Of The Ball. Portland finally has point guards healthy and playing. However, with a little bit of rust comes turnovers, as evidenced by Henderson\u2019s five turnovers in his return. As he gets more comfortable, those numbers should come back down quickly. With him looking visibly more comfortable as the game went on, that return to form could happen quick, which helps the Blazers as a whole shore up their turnovers. In the last game, Portland turned the ball over 18 times which allowed Memphis to score 19 points off turnovers. Getting that number down even slightly should help the Blazers\u2019 defense contain the Grizzlies even more than they did last night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Portland Trail Blazers are taking on the Memphis Grizzlies tonight once again for the second game of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3784],"tags":[7,601,56618,37790,6,687,471,3967,1617],"class_list":{"0":"post-589063","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-game-previews","11":"tag-blazers-gameday-coverage","12":"tag-nba","13":"tag-portland","14":"tag-portland-trail-blazers","15":"tag-portlandtrailblazers","16":"tag-trail-blazers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116031420205520406","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589063","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=589063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}