Trail Blazers Open Preseason With Loss to Clippers in Seattle
Toumani Camara stood out and Scoot Henderson struggled in Portland's exhibition opener.
📍 SEATTLE — The best way to describe the Trail Blazers’ preseason opener is that it was very much a preseason game.
Ambitious lineup combinations, veterans only playing the first half, no flow to anything—it was all on display in a game in Seattle that was treated as a Clippers home game from a game operations standpoint despite Portland being significantly closer than Los Angeles. Just like their game here two years ago, it was more of a Sonics crowd than anything else. The crowd did its part to show Seattle is beyond ready for an NBA team to come back, and that’s going to happen at some point.
As for the basketball that was played on Friday night?
Well, it was a basketball game that the Blazers played against another NBA team after two weeks of beating each other up in practice.
“It felt good to go out and play against somebody else,” Chauncey Billups said afterwards. “I thought we struggled, though. We turned it over, and even when we didn’t turn it over, it wasn’t clean at all. So I thought we struggled, as a group. But it was good to get out there.”
That about sums it up.
On an individual level, there were a few things to like on Portland’s end. Toumani Camara was the Blazers’ best player at both ends of the floor. Deni Avdija (who sat out Friday to observe Yom Kippur) is projected to start at small forward; just as he did last year, Camara is going to make it really difficult for Billups to keep him out of the starting lineup.
I thought Donovan Clingan was solid in his preseason NBA debut. His one block of the night was stifling Ivica Zubac at the rim—not an easy guy to block. He made the right passes all night and displayed good feel. The things that were always going to be obstacles early in his career were also on display. He picked up three fouls, which Billups said could be blamed on keeping his hands too low to go for steals, and was visibly gassed after his first shift. He played 19 minutes on the night, aided by Deandre Ayton’s night being over at halftime. With a full center rotation, it’s going to be less than that until Clingan’s body fully adjusts to NBA conditioning. But he’s going to be fine.
Less encouraging was Scoot Henderson’s first preseason showing. Outside of a couple of good finishes at the rim, it was a lot of the same struggles as he had for most of last season. He was sped up on offense and hunted on defense. All the caveats of preseason apply here, but after all the talk in training camp of a newly poised and confident Scoot ready for a fresh start, this was anything but.
One of Henderson’s better drives came in the closing seconds, with the Blazers training by one, and he put himself at the free-throw line with a chance to take the lead. He missed the first and made the second. A lob to Kai Jones put the Clippers up by two, and Dalano Banton missed a three at the buzzer, mercifully preventing preseason overtime.
The rest of Portland’s preseason will be all over the map. Billups won’t coach Sunday’s game in Sacramento—he and a few others in the organization are flying straight from Seattle to Springfield for his Hall of Fame induction ceremony that day. Nate Bjorkgren will serve as acting head coach, and Avdija is expected to make his preseason debut.
Their first home preseason game is against the German club Ratiopharm Ulm, and this one has a little more intrigue than your average international friendly. Ulm features two projected lottery picks: Israeli guard Ben Saraf and French wing Noa Essengue. Depending on how the lottery shakes out, and how this season goes from a development standpoint, one of those two might be more important to the Blazers’ future than most of the players who played Friday.