The Portland Trail Blazers led from the start almost all the way to the finish before Denver finally caught up in the final minute on their way to a 137-132 win Monday night.<\/p>\n
Toumani Camara hit his first four 3-pointers of the night to lift the Blazers to a 30-23 lead late in the first quarter, and he would hit another late in the first half to send the Blazers into the locker room up 72-58.<\/p>\n
Portland would lead by as many as 18 points and were in command 115-99 after a Camara mid-range jumper with 8:34 to play.<\/p>\n
But the Nuggets put on a late spurt and took the lead on a pair of Aaron Gordon 3-pointers in the final minute. Deni Avdija converted a layup in traffic to send the game to overtime tied 125-125.<\/p>\n
But Denver dominated the extra five minutes, moving in front on another Gordon long ball to start overtime, and the Nuggets stayed a step ahead the rest of the way.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re playing against a high-level team. They just had the poise to finish the game, and they were better than us — simple as that,\u201d Blazers coach Tiago Splitter said.<\/p>\n
Camara led the Blazers with 30 points, while Avdija scored 26. The Blazers converted 25 of 52 (48.1%) on 3-point tries, setting a franchise record for long-distance makes.<\/p>\n
Portland (40-39) dropped back into the No. 9 spot — a half-game behind the LA Clippers — heading into Wednesday\u2019s 6:30 p.m. game at San Antonio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Portland Trail Blazers led from the start almost all the way to the finish before Denver finally…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":702698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3784],"tags":[7,601,6,687,471,3967,1617],"class_list":{"0":"post-702697","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-nba","11":"tag-portland","12":"tag-portland-trail-blazers","13":"tag-portlandtrailblazers","14":"tag-trail-blazers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116361792880615775","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702697","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=702697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}