The Portland Trail Blazers and San Antonio Spurs will play the fifth, and perhaps final, game in their first-round 2026 NBA Playoffs series this evening. The Spurs lead 3-1. Portland is on the brink of elimination.<\/p>\n
Before the festivities commence and\/or end, we have one more conversation with J.R. Wilco of Blazer\u2019s Edge sister site Pounding the Rock<\/a>. The back-and-forth includes talk on Scoot Henderson, San Antonio\u2019s guards, and the potential future of the Blazers. Take a look!<\/p>\n Two questions after Game 4<\/p>\n First, Scoot Henderson\u2019s play on both ends has been one of Portland\u2019s highlights for me in this series, and his no-show in Game 4 surprised me. Do you feel this says anything about his long term outlook or his ceiling, and do you see anything in the way his smack talk in Game 3 lit a fire under Dylan Harper and could that have set up Sunday\u2019s performance\/lack thereof?<\/p>\n Second, I didn\u2019t like Castle putting the ball in Deni\u2019s chest after Avdija\u2019s foul in the fourth, but it shows the emotions going on behind the stoic facade Stephon usually maintains. Deni\u2019s a fiery guy and he definitely got fiery Sunday afternoon; what do you expect from him and the team in Game 5 as far as emotion and intensity? How chippy do you think it\u2019ll get on Tuesday?<\/p>\n The story on Scoot hasn\u2019t changed from the last frat. Nothing shows anything about Scoot Henderson\u2019s long-term potential. He goes up and down, like waves coming into a beach. If you try to predict the exact flow, you\u2019re just going to get frustrated. What you want to see is the tide coming in overall, that it\u2019s higher this month than it was last. That\u2019s generally true of Scoot, but you\u2019re still going to get some barnacle-smelly ebbs in the wave pattern.<\/p>\n Castle can do whatever Castle wants to do. So can Deni. Neither the Spurs nor the Blazers have been to the playoffs before and it shows. Portland is celebrating small moments and missing the big picture. San Antonio is jawing about coming back in games they never should have been down in. Any competent, veteran opponent would wrap either team up and send them home to mama right now. The difference is, the Spurs are going to have a chance to correct that in subsequent rounds while Portland won\u2019t. Either way, it\u2019s like watching two puppies bark at each other before somebody opens the gate and lets the Big Dog in.<\/p>\n As far as Game 5, your guess is as good as anybody\u2019s.<\/p>\n The Blazers could come out physically, mixing it up and fighting. I halfway doubt we\u2019ll see this simply because there seems to be a fatigue\/injury factor going on underneath the surface. In Game 3 Deni Avdija had worked up a huge sweat and was grabbing his shorts before hardly any time had elapsed. Jerami Grant looks a half a step slower than usual. It doesn\u2019t feel like they have a whole lot of physical fight left in them outside of Henderson and Toumani Camara. Usually you\u2019d expect Donovan Clingan to provide some of that too, but he\u2019s disappeared. Some of that might be inexperience and bad matchups. He\u2019s gotten whistled for a bunch of fouls in limited minutes too. He may be inside his own head about how to play at this point.<\/p>\n Either way, the Blazers could play chippy, but it\u2019s just as likely they\u2019ll come out flat and end it with a whimper. We\u2019ve seen both this season. You never know what you\u2019re going to get with this team. Best bet is that they fight for a little bit, then surrender when the outcome becomes obvious. I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve noticed, but whatever they\u2019re doing, it\u2019s like a train going downhill. When they\u2019re good, nobody is going to stop them. When they\u2019re bad, all the timeouts in the world won\u2019t turn it around. It\u2019s like dealing with a toddler. \u201cDon\u2019t do that! Don\u2019t do that! Don\u2019t do that! Awwww\u2026he did that.\u201d<\/p>\n But hey, you must be happy about Harper and Castle. Fox even peeked his head through the curtain in Game 4. Wemby has some help?<\/p>\n Yeah, Wemby has some help and that\u2019s the source of most of my positive anticipation for Game 5. Wemby\u2019s enough fun to watch just himself, but even at the best of his best, in his current form, he\u2019s totally unable to consistently control the game on offense. And I don\u2019t mean only in the way that the league\u2019s elite do, I mean just in the way ordinary excellent offensive players can.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just that teams regularly take him out of what he wants to do, sometimes all it takes is the right player! You\u2019ve seen Holiday do it for stretches. Now imagine that going on for an entire game. It was the source of frustration for me most of the season until Wemby figured out<\/a> (around the middle of February) that he doesn\u2019t need to score in order for the Spurs to have a dominant offense.<\/p>\n