In Less Than 24 Hours, Trail Blazers Lose a Blowout and a Heartbreaker

📍PORTLAND, Ore. — Everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong for the Trail Blazers right now.

Bodies are dropping left and right. After missing Tuesday's blowout loss to Phoenix with an illness, a still-under-the-weather Jerami Grant came back the following night to play the Bulls. That's about the only positive on the health front. Jrue Holiday has missed the last three games with a calf strain, and Shaedon Sharpe was added to the long list of players around the NBA dealing with calf and soft tissue injuries on Wednesday. Scoot Henderson has no return in sight and Matisse Thybulle and Blake Wesley are still out for a while. Being forced to start one of their two-way players, Sidy Cissoko, less than a month into the season is a tough place to be.

Even when this undermanned squad plays well enough to win—like their inspiring comeback from a 21-point fourth-quarter deficit against Chicago on Wednesday night—they come up just short, done in by unforced errors and young-player growing pains.

If a few balls bounced differently in the last two weeks, the Blazers could plausibly have won five of their last seven games. Instead, they've lost six of seven, including their last four in a row, struggling to maintain the pace and physicality they built their identity on for the first two weeks of the season as players continue getting hurt and the ones that are able to play get tired.

Those close calls, like Nikola Vucevic's buzzer-beating three on Wednesday to snuff out the Blazers' comeback, are going to haunt them in the play-in (or playoff) seeding race. But you are what your record says you are.

"It's difficult to play the way we want to play," acting head coach Tiago Splitter said after Tuesday's loss to the Suns. "We don't have the energy to play fast. We're getting slower and slower. We're having to play guys that are in development roles right now."

Vucevic's shot was the backbreaker on Wednesday, but what was particularly vexing about that loss was the Blazers' 21-for-32 performance at the foul line. Grant missed two, including one in the final eight seconds. Deni Avdija, who was otherwise spectacular in leading the comeback with a 32-point triple-double, missed five. This team, in the current state they're in, is not good enough offensively to get away with shooting that poorly from the line.

The one encouraging thing during this stretch, for the team's long-term future, is the way their most important players have owned up to their own late-game failures.

In Dallas, on the last game of their five-game road trip on Sunday, Avdija blew the final possession of regulation, dribbling out the clock and then hoisting up a contested three-pointer that had no chance of going in, sending the game to overtime. Afterwards, Avdija said it was completely on him, and he "should have been smarter."

On Wednesday, it was Toumani Camara's turn to own the loss. On the Bulls' final possession, he helped off Vucevic to double-team Coby White, who kicked it out to the veteran big man for the wide-open three that won the game for Chicago.

Camara messed up, and he knew it.

“I overhelped,” he said. “I mean, we’re winning by two points. No threes. That’s a known rule in the game of basketball at the end of the game. And my instincts just took over and that was my fault.”

It's better that Camara and Avdija, who will be counted on to make clutch plays at both ends of the floor in the postseason if they get there, learn these lessons in November than in April.

“Somebody made a mistake and that’s part of the game,” Splitter said. “That’s not the only play that we did wrong. We’ve got to count the whole game. I don’t like to point at one play and that’s it. They made 21 threes. We talked about that before the game. So it’s not one play. It’s a sum of many plays.”

What the Bulls loss showed is that the shorthanded Blazers aren't done fighting and still believe internally that they can win games despite how many players they're missing.

"We have a chance to win every night," Grant said. "It hasn't been going our way for the last stretch, but I do think we have a chance to win every night."

There's no telling when reinforcements are coming. Holiday is still considered day-to-day; Sharpe's status is up in the air after he underwent an MRI on his calf. Henderson is still weeks out from a return.

But the schedule is not letting up. The Blazers start a tough three-game road trip that takes them to Golden State, Oklahoma City and Milwaukee before coming home to play San Antonio, and then another daunting road trip to start December.

All they can do is keep fighting.

"We don't got no choice," Grant said.