Blazers 122, Jazz 108 Re-Thoughts

It doesn’t get much more fun than that.

And I mean honestly mean that. Winning is fun. Winning by double digits is more fun. Beating a +.500 team is funner. Beating Utah at home is even more funner. Defeating the Jazz in a game where we never trailed is the funnest. And that third quarter was just uber-fun. If you don’t know…I have a deep hatred for the Jazz. Deep. So I enjoyed every single second of this one. Not to mention the fact that we out-physicaled the always physical Jazz and made them turn it over 16 times. It’s hard to find a lot to be unhappy about. It’s also hard to put a lot of stock into this game.

Bar none reason why we won? Offense. This was the best offensive performance we could possibly have. And probably the best offensive performance will have this year.

The offensive execution was disgustingly amazing. In my pre-thoughts I said a key to success was scoring the basketball which sounded obvious. Well Portland scored the hell out of the basketball tonight to the tune of 122 points. That’s the second highest scoring output of the year for the Blazers, behind the 124 Portland dropped on Phoenix on B-Roy’s 52 point night. The statistics are staggering. I hate using stats but these truly speak for themselves:

55.8% from the field for the game (43-for-77).
50% from behind the arc (10-for-20)
Six players in double figures
Batum hit 4 three’s.

I don’t even know what to add on to that. I really don’t. You don’t get offensive performances like that every day, so do we enjoy it or worry? I’m going to go ahead and enjoy it. The defense was absolutely stankonia, like worse than the movie ‘I Know Who Killed Me’. Deron Williams just toyed with the defense like it was his birthday or something. But we got away with it so I’m having a hard time getting too mad about it. It’s like complaining about your new girlfriend’s insistence on saying that jokes are funny instead of laughing at them. It’s nitpicking. Sure we gave up 54% shooting but then again we never trailed so for this particular game our crappy defense didn’t matter. I chalk it up to just one of those nights. Yes Deron Williams went to work on Portland. He was supposed to, he’s an All-Star and the Blazers had zero answer defensively for him. More important was Milsap finally being contained for once in his career against Portland.

Oden? Well…9 times out of 10 if he picks up 2 quick fouls in the first quarter he’s going to have a rough game. It’s just the way his formula goes right now. He’s still trying to find his way towards that corner so he can turn it, and he’ll have a chance against quality competition this week (Dallas, NO). Tonight just was not destined to be his night. There is only so much you can accomplish in 11 minutes. Besides Big Joel was more than ready to pick up the slack, beasting his way to a double-double and proving his overwhelming value to the team. Still time to see if Oden can find his way toward Beast Mode.

It’s always fun to win but there’s no need for a parade quite yet. This is a game we were supposed to win…and we won it. One of the beautiful things about this Blazer team this year is that they are always making progress. On the season there have been very few setbacks where you feel like Portland’s going in the wrong direction. This was a different team than the one who lost to Cleveland. In that game Portland was tentative until it was too late. Tonight they were aggressive from the start and set the tone for the game. It’s good to see that Portland took advantage of a “softer” schedule to work on some things that have haunted them against better teams. We’ll see if it pays off on the road.