If Friday night's game against the Golden State Warriors was a test of their ability to compete with basketball's best teams, most every indication suggests that the Portland Trail Blazers failed.
The league-leading Warriors beat the Blazers 118-103 at Chase Center, using a balanced scoring attack and dogged team-wide defense to send Portland to another road loss. Golden State shot 54% from the floor, doled out 31 assists and scored 64 points in the paint. The home team's 121.6 offensive rating was a full eight points better than the Utah Jazz's top-ranked mark, and would've been even higher if not for the Warriors' lackluster 12-of-37 shooting from beyond the arc.
Numbers from the other end aren't much kinder to the Blazers. Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum never found their footing, combining for 32 points on as many field goal attempts. Portland shot just 41.9% overall, en route to a paltry 103.0 offensive rating—its third-worst mark of the regular season.
After the game, though, Chauncey Billups wasn't harping on his team's two-way performance or even continued inability to win away from home. Instead, the rookie head coach praised the Blazers for refusing to quit after Golden State opened up a 21-point lead in the third quarter.
“Third-quarter Warriors is a whole new basketball team,” Billups said. “They came out, jumped on us, and I was just proud of our guys. We just kept fighting, kept scrapping. It was a game. They kinda pulled away from us in the fourth, but I was happy, man. We played extremely, extremely hard today. They played their butts off.”
Box score be damned, those sentiments aren't entirely misplaced.
Portland had the game tied at 42-42 less than three minutes before halftime, going to toe-to-toe with Golden State on both sides of the ball. A series of questionable calls that eventually led to a Damian Lillard technical and Scott Brooks' ejection sparked a 16-4 Warriors run going into intermission, though, hinting at a blowout to come.
But the Blazers clawed back in the fourth quarter, twice cutting their deficit to eight behind the offensive exploits of Anfernee Simons. Getting additional burn due to the absence of Norman Powell, who left the game early with a right quad contusion, Simons exploded for 13 points and three triples in the final stanza.
“Obviously, his shot-making was huge for us,” Billups said of Simons. “He took some tough shots and was able to make them. But I thought his defense was good too, guarding Steph at times.”
A veteran team like Portland shouldn't be satisfied with moral victories. Given their struggles to manage consistent game-by-game effort in the season's early going, though, that the Blazers didn't roll over on the road versus the league's best team is at least a sign of ongoing progress.
The next step is turning that sustained edge and intensity into game-long play that could actually get Portland, now 1-10 on the road, a quality win outside Moda Center.
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