Deandre Ayton Returns From Ice Misadventure as Trail Blazers Beat Pacers
Portland got its second win in a row against the new-look Pacers.
📍 PORTLAND, Ore. — I guess the Trail Blazers can be penciled in for one weather-related adventure a year.
Last season, it was the team plane grounded on the tarmac on the way to Sacramento, as commemorated by some Dame D.O.L.L.A. bars. That was no match, though, for what Deandre Ayton had to go through this week.
Leading into Wednesday’s win over Brooklyn, Ayton had missed the previous 11 games due to a knee injury. He was all set to return. The ice storm that’s gripped the Portland metro area all week had other ideas.
By now, you’ve seen all the tweets and read all the jokes. You’ve read the truly bizarre takes on the situation from unnamed sports blogs, either going on tangents about the Blazers’ former general manager being “cancelled” or unfairly bringing the team’s on-air talent into it. Judging by my mentions on “X, The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter,” there are a lot of people in colder cities who don’t understand why Ayton didn’t just walk from his house in the suburbs to the Moda Center, or why he didn’t have a snowmobile on hand just for the occasion.
For what it’s worth, Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, whose stops in his playing career included Boston, Toronto, Detroit, Denver and New York, opened his pregame media availability on Wednesday by cautioning fans to stay safe because the weather was nothing like anything he’d experienced.
(I promise, if Ayton had torn his ACL trying to walk on this ice, it would have been filed under the “Blazers big man curse” and he would not have been lauded for his bravery. But that’s neither here nor there.)
According to multiple team sources, the Blazers did attempt to retrieve Ayton from his house, but they weren’t even able to get all the way there. If you’ve tried to drive in Portland this week, it’s not hard to figure out what happened. Amazingly, this isn’t even the first time in Blazers franchise history this has happened—Dale Davis missed a game in 2004 because he was snowed in. He was fined for it, and eventually filed a grievance against the team to get his money back. There’s none of that going on here.
Ayton was, however, able to get to the Moda Center on Friday for a matchup with Indiana, headlined by Pascal Siakam’s Pacers debut and Tyrese Haliburton’s return from injury. And the Blazers won their second game in a row (for just the third time this season), and first against a good team since beating Sacramento almost a month ago.
Speaking to reporters for the first time since the misadventure, Ayton didn’t really want to go into specifics about the previous 48 hours.
“We tried, that’s it,” he said. “We tried to get out and I couldn’t get out. I don’t need to go into any detail. We gave you all the details we needed to give, to be honest. Portland sent people to try to get me and they couldn’t get me, so I had to miss the game. It was going to be too late. No boat, no helicopter, nothing. I just had to take the L. But my guys got me.”
Ayton was excellent in the first quarter Friday, with six points on 3-for-5 shooting and three rebounds and playing solid defense. After that, he started leaving shots short. Billups said he looked “rusty.”
“Games like that frustrate me, because I’m working so hard to get back in practice,” Ayton said. “Playing that 5-on-0, it looks good. Shooting over nobody. Then in the game, the fatigue kicks in and the mental stamina kicks in. I’ve got a lot going on, and then coming back against the No. 1-paced team in the world, lack of oxygen going to the brain, all of that stuff kicked in.”
With Anfernee Simons out sick, Jerami Grant’s 37 points and Malcolm Brogdon’s 30 led the way. Jabari Walker started in place of Toumani Camara for the second game in a row and had 12 rebounds. He’ll probably keep that spot for the foreseeable future.
Scoot Henderson caught an elbow from Myles Turner in the first half and exited with a nasal contusion. He may not miss any time, but we might get a mask to go with the goggles as the next evolution of the look. More on this story as it develops.
Since returning home from the disastrous early-January road trip, the Blazers have looked more like the early-season version of themselves—playing together and competing against better teams like the Pacers, even occasionally winning. In other words, a fun bad team rather than an unwatchable bad team.
“I liked so much about it,” Billups said. “We had so many people contribute.”