One of the most consequential and controversial years in Portland Trail Blazers history ended in depressingly fitting fashion on Friday night, as the Los Angeles Lakers blew out Damian Lillard and company 139-106 to ring in 2022.
LeBron James, who turned 37 on Thursday, celebrated his birthday with one of the most ruthlessly efficient and dominant performances of his career. He finished with 43 points, 14 rebounds, four assists, two steals and two blocks on 16-of-26 shooting, video-game numbers made all the more impressive considering James didn't even notch 30 minutes of play.
No player in league history had ever done what James did to the Blazers until New Year's Eve.
Players in NBA history with 40+ points, 10+ rebounds, 5+ threes in fewer than 30 minutes played:
1. LeBron James tonight
That’s the list. pic.twitter.com/2VqLu6Vclp
— StatMuse (@statmuse) January 1, 2022
“LeBron was vintage LeBron,” acting Blazers head coach Scott Brooks said after the game. “When he's making 30-footers, [going] coast-to-coast, with his strength and turnaround jump-shots…We tried everything. We tried to go under, we tried to double, we tried to put bigger size on him.”
Jusuf Nurkic and Cody Zeller, Portland's two traditional centers, were among seven players missing Friday's due to health-and-safety protocols. But even if Robert Covington and their pair of seven-footers were available, the Blazers would still have had no answer for James.
Larry Nance Jr., starting at center, is better as a help defender than primary stopper. Just like Nassir Little and even Tony Snell, though, he was supposed to at least play passable individual defense when matched up with a superstar forward like James. Instead, Portland seemed more bereft of passable wing defenders than ever against the Lakers.
“Not a good game for us. There's no way around it. Not a good game for us,” Brooks said. “We just made a lot of mistakes that I thought we should never make, because they were pretty simple ones.”
Execution was definitely as big a problem as the Blazers' personnel.
Russell Westbrook found James with a bullet pass for a layup right down the middle of Portland's 2-3 zone. James was inexplicably left completely alone on a baseline out-of-bounds play, cutting to the ball for athunderous jam as a confused Nance turned his head to realize what was happening. On a side pick-and-roll with a guard setting the screen, Lillard barely reacted in help position as James turned the corner for yet another highlight-reel finish.
The Lakers shot 17-of-23 in the restricted area and 19-of-41 from beyond the arc. The 139.0 offensive rating was Los Angeles' highest of the regular season. The Blazers—now sporting the league's worst defensive rating, by the way—had allowed that sky-high mark just once before Friday, in a similarly dispiriting home loss to the Boston Celtics on December 4th.
There are obvious caveats to the Blazers' performance. They were major underdogs at Crypto.com Arena for a reason. But the Lakers aren't exactly a juggernaut even at full-strength, either, and Brooks' dogged post-game insistence that Portland's veterans gave “everything they had” rung hollow. Portland's unenviable current circumstances are clearly beginning to weigh on Lillard, Norman Powell and Nance.
The Blazers will get a cleaner bill of COVID-19 health at some point this season, and C.J. McCollum is close to returning from a collapsed lung. What won't change unless Joe Cronin makes major moves before the trade deadline, though, are the same roster deficiences that have plagued this team since long before the pandemic and the turn of the calendar.
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