The Portland Trail Blazers faced the San Antonio Spurs on Wednesday night without Victor Wembanyama on the floor and with plenty to play for in the Western Conference Play-In Tournament race. None of that ended up mattering much. Portland showed up with a tepid effort\u2013with spurts of energy, largely directionless\u2013on their way to a 112-101 loss.<\/p>\n
One saving grace is that, at the time of publishing, the Los Angeles Clippers are losing to the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Clips are Portland\u2019s opponent in the fight for the 8th spot in the conference and its privileges in the Play-In Tournament. They\u2019re also Portland\u2019s opponent in their next game on Friday night. If the Clippers lose as well, Portland\u2019s loss is no harm, no foul.<\/p>\n
Deni Avdija was the leading scorer for Portland with 29. De\u2019Aaron Fox led the Spurs with 25.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll have more detailed analysis up soon. In the meantime here\u2019s a slice of the game.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re going to give this to Avdija, who has made a season out of barbecuing the Spurs. Avdija showed up again with 6 rebounds and 6 assists on 13-21 shooting to get his 29. He had 6 turnovers too but his teammates weren\u2019t allowing him many outs besides charging straight forward and praying. At least he kept Portland within shouting distance.<\/p>\n
The Spurs shot 49% from the field in this one. Believe it or not, they tailed off at the end of the game to get there. That tells you everything you need to know. They were only a little above average from the arc at 38%. But Portland couldn\u2019t cut off the midrange games of their speedy guards, which then opened up the rim for cuts and passes. That high percentage was simply too much for the Blazers to overcome.<\/p>\n
It was a bad night for Portland\u2019s point guards. Jrue Holiday shot 6-17, 1-7 from distance. Scoot Henderson wengt 7-20, 3-9 and looked brilliant by comparison. Even Blake Wesley only managed to shoot 1-4 in 4 minutes of play. Between them the trio had but 9 assists in 72 minutes of play. The Blazers just couldn\u2019t get into anything besides iso ball.<\/p>\n
The Blazers now return home for a Friday night matchup with this year\u2019s archrivals, the Los Angeles Clippers. The game starts at 7:00 PM, Pacific.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Portland Trail Blazers faced the San Antonio Spurs on Wednesday night without Victor Wembanyama on the floor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3797],"tags":[7,37790,13851,6,969,474,4075,4074,534],"class_list":{"0":"post-706345","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio-spurs","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-blazers-gameday-coverage","10":"tag-instant-recaps","11":"tag-nba","12":"tag-san-antonio","13":"tag-san-antonio-spurs","14":"tag-sanantonio","15":"tag-sanantoniospurs","16":"tag-spurs"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116372804017155944","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706345","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=706345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}