The Portland Trail Blazers might’ve discovered the most crushing way to lose a basketball game Wednesday night.
Fighting through a losing skid, severely shorthanded again, and seemingly without a pulse early in the fourth quarter, the Blazers pulled off a comeback for the ages against the Chicago Bulls at the Moda Center. Portland unleashed a 32-7 run to claw back from a 21-point fourth-quarter deficit and somehow take a 120-116 lead with 16 seconds left.
After all that, a deep 3 from Coby White and
missed free throws from Blazers forwards Jerami Grant and Deni Avdija still exposed Portland to potential heartbreak. The Bulls had the ball, trailing by two, with 7.2 seconds remaining. White drove, spun and kicked out to a wide-open Nikola Vucevic from beyond the arc. The big man buried it at the buzzer to deliver Portland a 122-121 loss.
“We talked about no 3s… and no helps,” Blazers interim head coach Tiago Splitter said about that final defensive possession. “Somebody made a mistake, and that’s part of the game, and that’s not the only play that we did wrong. You gotta count the whole game. I don’t like to point at one play and that’s it.”
That “somebody” was All-Defensive Second Team forward Toumani Camara, who took full ownership of the mistake in the postgame locker room. He explained how he accidentally drifted into the paint to leave Vucevic — who had already made four 3s that night — open for the fatal blow.
“It was completely my fault. I over-helped,” Camara said. “We’re winning by two points. No 3s. That’s a known rule in the game of basketball at the end of the game, and my instincts just took over.”
During this stretch where the Blazers have now lost six of their last seven games and multiple heartbreakers, Vucevic’s walk-off winner was as shocking as it was predictable. — 50% you can’t be serious!? and 50% of course. Considering the height of the mountain Portland scaled in that fourth quarter to take the lead, as well as how badly they could’ve used a win to stop the bleeding, this loss was almost cruel.
Before Vucevic spoiled it all, the fight the Blazers showed in that fourth quarter was special. Avdija led the charge, finishing with a 32-point, 11-rebound, 11-assist triple-double. Donovan Clingan was a beast on the glass on his way to 17 points and 21 rebounds, including 10 on the offensive end. Jerami Grant, who had been vomiting earlier in the day and battling an illness, still played 37 minutes and provided 33 points and nine rebounds. Grant, Avdija, Camara and Kris Murray all played every minute of the fourth quarter.
“Fourth quarter, it was outstanding grit and fight,” Splitter said. “A lot of guys playing a lot of minutes in a row. … And just going through the adversity and making plays on both ends.”
The Blazers were without starting guards Jrue Holiday and Shaedon Sharpe and four other regular rotation players on the second night of a back-to-back. They were down 21 with less than 9:30 remaining. Yet it still looked like they would steal a victory and leave for their upcoming three-game road trip with a spark of momentum. Instead, that great comeback and those great individual performances have been relegated to moral victory status, and the Blazers are still searching for their slump-busting win.
Camara said he probably wouldn’t be able to sleep after that loss because the final play would be replaying in his head all night. But he was also one of multiple Blazers players who looked to that fourth-quarter comeback as a silver lining and a sign of hope moving forward. Even in the midst of this rough patch, Camara said the team’s confidence isn’t rattled.
“We know what we’re capable of,” he said. “It’s just the second time we’ve been beat like that on a buzzer-beater so it’s kind of painful. But [Damian Lillard] told me after the game, ‘We live and we grow.’ Sidy [Cissoko] also told me that ‘basketball is a game of mistakes,’ so you just gotta move forward. We’ve got 67 more games.”
