After Getting Trail Blazers Back to the Playoffs, Tiago Splitter Has Made Himself the Obvious Choice to Stay the Head Coach

📍PHOENIX — The Trail Blazers' Tuesday play-in victory over the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday night was a coming-out party for a lot of people.

It certainly was for Deni Avdija, who made big-time shot after big-time shot in the fourth quarter and scored 41 points to lead the Blazers to a comeback win.

It was for Scoot Henderson, too, even though the box score didn't show it. He overcame early foul trouble and made impact plays at both ends in the first game he's played in with any kind of stakes since he was in high school in Georgia.

And in the biggest moment of Tiago Splitter's brief, strange career as a head coach, he also came up clutch. He pushed the right buttons when it looked like the Blazers were going to fold in a game that was most of this group's first taste of any kind of postseason action. But it was a timeout he called halfway through the fourth quarter, with Phoenix leading by 11, that swung it back in their direction.

"'Listen, guys, it's a game momentum and a game of runs,'" Splitter says he told them in the huddle. "'They had their run, now we're going to have ours. You have to be patient and keep pushing, and it's going to come.' And it did. It's easy to go down and give up, and they didn't. The resilience of this group to keep fighting, to find ways to score, to find ways to defend, to believe in the scout and the plan that we had for the game. And they kept doing it."

Now, the Blazers are in the playoffs for the first time in five years. They'll go to San Antonio as the seventh seed to play the Spurs in the first round, which begins on Sunday. Splitter's first playoff series as a head coach will come against the team he won a championship with as a player in 2014.

No matter how that series goes, getting the Blazers to this point, with everything they've been through since October, should make one thing obvious to new owner Tom Dundon: the next four-to-seven games should not be the last ones Splitter coaches in Portland.