The Portland Trail Blazers’ victory over the Golden State Warriors sends the team into the All-Star break on a positive note.
The Portland Trail Blazers pulled off the seemingly impossible on Wednesday night. The team defeated the defending champion Golden State Warriors, 123-117. The win aired nationally on ESPN with franchise legend Bill Walton in attendance to commentate on the game.
This was a huge win for Portland. Golden State has been underachieving by its standards, and the Blazers took advantage. They outscored Golden State 40-27 in the first quarter and scored 27 points off of turnovers. They even held off the inevitable Warriors runs, leading for almost the entire game and not turning the ball over in the fourth quarter.
Kevin Durant had 50 points on the night. It was his fifth career 50-point game and first as a Warrior. However, that was combatted by Damian Lillard‘s 44 points and C.J. McCollum‘s 29. The Oregonian points out that Lillard has now completed the highest-scoring three-game stretch in franchise history. He had scored 50 and 39 points in the prior two games.
The Blazers wrap up the first half of the season with a 32-26 record. That’s eight games better than where they were 48 games into last season. They have the same record as their division rival Denver Nuggets. However, Portland loses out on the tiebreaker due to being 1-2 in the season series. Therefore, they currently stand seventh in the Western Conference.
Despite the win, it has been a choppy February for the Blazers. The team is 3-4 on the month. It kicked off with an 0-3 East Coast road trip. Portland fell to the Toronto Raptors, Boston Celtics and Detroit Pistons in those games, losing by an average of 15.3 points per game.
However, Portland recovered by going 3-1 in their final four games before the break. They defeated the Charlotte Hornets in overtime and the Sacramento Kings on the road. The Blazers then lost by 19 to the Utah Jazz, another victim of their active 11-game winning streak. But the team managed to recover just in time to take down the Warriors.
Now, Rip City has a week to rest their minds and bodies, which is good, because it will be another gauntlet once they return from the break.
Thanks to the earlier trade deadline, the Blazers will have to go the rest of the way with their core rotation intact. General manager Neil Olshey’s only transaction shipped Noah Vonleh to the Chicago Bulls for the draft rights to Milovan Rakovic. At 32 years old, Rakovic will likely never see an NBA court.
That also means the Blazers didn’t acquire any extra help to push them up a tier in the Western Conference hierarchy. If the team wants to improve on their seventh seed, it will be up to the current roster to step up their game.
Their schedule will be a bear to handle. Sixteen of the Blazers’ remaining 24 games are against teams that are currently above .500. Their first game back will be on Feb. 23 against the Jazz. This stretch of games will test the team’s mettle and consistency, truly showing if it has improved from last year.
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The Portland Trail Blazers’ victory over the Golden State Warriors was big for a team that truly needed it. However, we’ll see how they respond after a week of much-needed rest.