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No one expected the Portland Trail Blazers to put up much of a fight against the Utah Jazz on Wednesday night at Moda Center, even with Donovan Mitchell back in Salt Lake City nursing a minor back injury. Tough as it is for the thoroughly depleted Blazers to swallow, a burgeoning number in the loss column isn't even their main concern right now.
Portland fell to the Jazz 120-105, never posing Quin Snyder's team a real threat despite a spirited effort from its cobbled-together roster. Just six regular rotation players were available for the Blazers on Wednesday. Jusuf Nurkic, Robert Covington, Cody Zeller and Ben McLemore were among six of their teammates in health and safety protocols, and CJ McCollum sat for a 1oth straight game while ramping up to return from a collapsed right lung. Chauncey Billups was out due to COVID-19, too.
Much of what plagued Portland in Monday's blowout loss to the Dallas Mavericks transpired 48 hours later.
After Kristaps Porzingis exploded for 34 points against an overmanned, undersized frontcourt, Rudy Gobert, Hassan Whiteside and even Rudy Gay had their way with the Blazers on the interior. Portland's switching defensive scheme curbed 3-point attempts, but hardly yielded stops. Though Damian Lillard put up big numbers again, he wasn't nearly good enough to give his team a puncher's chance to win — even with an opposing perimeter superstar out of the lineup, like Luka Doncic was on Monday.
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After the game, though, what Lillard lamented most wasn't the familiar tenor of another short-handed loss or even the physical toll of his offensive burden growing heavier.
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“It's challenging, it's tough being down so many players, down coaches,” he said. “It was already a situation where we were still trying to figure things out, and get comfortable with our staff and everything being so new to us. That's an adjustment by itself. So now we come back from the road trip and we got a whole new team, we can't really run much actions offensively, we're teaching defensive principles all over again.”
As they labored out of the gate this season, Billups, Lillard and the rest of the Blazers regularly found silver linings in extended stretches or even single possessions of losses, appealing to the growing pains bound to face a revamped roster and coaching staff. It seemed like they were worthy of that underlying confidence shortly after Lillard returned to the court from two weeks of resting his abdominal injury.
Portland played the Minnesota Timberwolves and Phoenix Suns close even without McCollum, then Lillard came alive in back-to-back wins over the Charlotte Hornets and Memphis Grizzlies. COVID-19 made its way through the Blazers less than a week later, though, just like it already had for most of the league, ridding them of the fleeting continuity it took so long to muster in the first place.
The loss to Utah moves Portland to 13-21, which is good for 12th in the West.
“It's definitely been a challenge,” Lillard said of the Blazers' absences. “As a team, we've done a good job of just continuing to fight, continuing to work, continuing to compete, and we've just been coming up short. It just hasn't been good enough.”
For Lillard and Portland's sake, hopefully that effort proves good enough against the similarly ravaged Los Angeles Lakers on Friday.
