The Portland Trail Blazers suffered a deflating 110-98 defeat to the San Antonio Spurs Friday night at the Moda Center in Game 3 of the NBA Playoffs first round. With Game 4 fast approaching on Sunday afternoon, the Blazers will have to turn the page quickly if they want to even up the series at 2-2 before flying back to Texas.
About 12 hours after that crushing defeat, they were right back to work at the team practice facility in Tualatin on Saturday morning.
“We put the game behind us,” Blazers All-Star
Deni Avdija told reporters. “It’s one game. We watched film. We talked as a group. … Definitely, we understood that we got punched in the mouth yesterday, and we just gotta respond.”
Along with Avdija, Blazers acting head coach Tiago Splitter and forward Toumani Camara spoke with media after practice. Here are some quick insights from the conversations.
- A major talking point in Friday’s postgame interviews was the Spurs took control of the game in the second half because they were more physical than the Blazers. That talking point continued Saturday, with Avdija expecting Game 4 to be the most physical game of the series yet. But he said the Blazers would be ready for it.
- “Game 1, they were the more physical team. Game 2, we were the more physical team. Now they ramped up their physicality Game 3. … I’m expecting to wear two mouthguards [in Game 4].”
- On the subject of physicality and dental protection, Avdija’s chipped front tooth from Game 3 — which came from a De’Aaron Fox elbow and resulted in a controversial foul call on Avdija — was already fixed at Saturday practice. The star discussed the extra physicality the Spurs have thrown at him all series and how it played a part in him going just 3-15 from the field in Game 3:
- “There’s a lot of things that you can’t see inside. There’s a lot of grabbing. There’s a lot of elbows. There’s a lot of little talks. They’re trying to get me out of the game, but I’m gonna be ready. I expected it. I expect them to be physical with me. I expected them to do what they did yesterday, and they did a pretty good job. I’ll give them that. They took me out of the game a little bit. But I can only learn from it. I can only get experience from that. I’m not backing off.”
- Splitter also talked about how he can help put Avdija and the rest of the team in better places to succeed by diversifying the offense more.
- “I think we got to be a little bit smarter with how we attack and use Deni. Maybe it was too much of Deni at certain points of the game. We gotta move the ball around more. That’s my fault. We gotta involve more guys. It was too easy to guard Deni and be physical with him. We gotta be smarter. We gotta move the ball around, and I gotta take the ownership and be better.”
- Splitter expanded on that later:
- “We got to this point playing together. We had a lot of things that happened throughout the season. Our two-ways helped. Eighteen guys helped us to get to this point. … Duop [Reath] helped us to get here. [Rayan] Rupert helped us to get here. … We cannot go away from that. We gotta play together and win basketball games together. I know it’s repetitive and cliche but this is how we got here.”
- Camara discussed how the playoff intensity has impacted this Blazers team:
- “I think in a good way. We’re learning a lot right now. I feel like it’s a very positive experience. We can’t stay stuck on the last game. We’ve showed a lot of great throughout the whole series, so we still have a very good chance to win this series. So I’m still very confident to what we can do and what we can keep showing throughout this.”
Game 4 is set to tip off on Sunday at 12:30 p.m. Pacific.
