The Portland Trail Blazers fell short of an upset against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday night in a 124-121 loss. The two teams played a physical, hard-fought game until the very end, but Portland could not quite get the job done as Minnesota took advantage of key opportunities late to pull away.<\/p>\n
The Blazers were led in scoring by the 22 points of Jrue Holiday. Jerami Grant and Scoot Henderson added 21 and 19 points respectively.<\/p>\n
Anthony Edwards led the game in scoring with 34 points in the contest. That was supplemented by the 27 points of Jaden McDaniels.<\/p>\n
Kris Murray had a season-high 16 points playing in the starting lineup. He scored 14 of those in the first half on a very efficient 7-10 shooting performance, including 2-3 behind the arc. His offensive contribution helped the Blazers get an unlikely boost, keeping them in the game as the Timberwolves threatened to pull away in the first half.<\/p>\n
Second half points for Anthony Edwards: 9. After an explosive 25-point first half for Edwards, the Blazers were able to limit him to just 3-15 shooting from the field. The defensive pressure applied to the superstar mitigated his impact.<\/p>\n
Being able to keep Edwards from building momentum from a hot start into a massive scoring game kept Portland in the game until late in the contest.<\/p>\n
Up against a real center in Rudy Gobert, the advantage of having Donovan Clingan in the middle was mitigated. After a string of games against teams without a true interior presence at the five, Gobert was a wake-up call of sorts. He finished with 19 rebounds and 2 blocks to go along with 10 points. Clingan was still able to grab 15 boards and swat 2 shots himself, but it has been a while since the Blazers did not have the definitive advantage in the middle.<\/p>\n
Portland was still able to win the rebounding battle 54-46 overall, but Gobert\u2019s abilities helped the Timberwolves grab more than a few timely boards late in the contest.<\/p>\n
The Blazers head out on a five-game road trip with their first stop in Chicago on Thursday to take on the Bulls at 5:00 p.m. PST.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Portland Trail Blazers fell short of an upset against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday night in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623447,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3784],"tags":[7,601,37790,13851,6,687,471,3967,1617],"class_list":{"0":"post-623446","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-gameday-coverage","11":"tag-instant-recaps","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\/116130003458769236","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623446","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=623446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}