DALLAS — As Jerami Grant contemplated a four-and-a-half-hour late-night flight from Dallas to Portland, he had several options for how he might pass the time in the friendly skies.
The Portland Trail Blazers veteran could slip on a pair of headphones and listen to some tunes. He could pull out a tablet and zone out to a movie.
He could stew over the details of another down-to-the-wire Blazers defeat and dwell on another winnable game that slipped away in crunch time.
In the end, he settled on a different option altogether.
“I’m about to go to sleep, man,” Grant said, chuckling, as he got dressed in the visiting locker room at American Airlines Center.
It was that kind of night — and that kind of trip — for Grant and the Blazers, who stumbled to the lowest point of their season Sunday, when they suffered a 138-134 overtime loss to the Dallas Mavericks.
When the Blazers left last week for the beaches of Miami, they were riding a wave of promise and momentum swelling from that win over the reigning-champion Oklahoma City Thunder. But 10 days later, after sputtering to four losses in five games, enduring another injury to a key player and taking a few more crunch-time blows on the chin, the Blazers returned home with a losing record (6-7) and mired in a funk.
A laundry list of bugaboos is sabotaging the Blazers right now, ranging from Shaedon Sharpe’s shaky shooting to poor defensive execution to injuries in the backcourt. But perhaps the biggest is that this young, rebuilding team is struggling to produce in the clutch.
Nine of the Blazers’ 13 games this season have featured “clutch-time” — when the score is within five points in the final five minutes — and they are 4-5 in those games. Four of the five losses came on this trip, including Sunday night’s setback against the reeling Mavericks, who had lost three in a row and were draped in the drama caused by last week’s firing of general manager Nico Harrison.
The Blazers held leads late in regulation and in overtime, but faded down the stretch of both. Deni Avdija missed a golden opportunity to win the game in the fourth quarter, airballing a step-back three at the buzzer, and the Blazers’ defense was abysmal in overtime, when Dallas made all seven of its field goal attempts as Cooper Flagg, Daniel Gafford, P.J. Williams and Brandon Williams took turns punishing Portland. Meanwhile, the Blazers made just 1 of 4 shots over the final 48.8 seconds of the extra period, sabotaging any chance to win.
After bowing out late against Miami and suffering a Desmond Bane buzzer-beater in Orlando earlier on this trip, it was another late-game blow.
Interim coach Tiago Splitter said he wished his team had played smarter on defense, especially late, when Blazers players veered outside their schemes and lost too many one-on-one matchups. Camara lamented the Blazers’ turnovers, poor decision-making and spotty rebounding down the stretch. And Avdija blamed himself for his last-second miss in regulation, saying he should have worked inside the three-point line in an effort to create a better shot attempt.
“I take responsibility about that last shot,” he said. “It’s about me. I’m learning … I should have done better. I should have been smarter. And next time I’m going to have the same chance and I’m definitely going to learn from it.”
Really, one could argue Portland’s rough patch is one big learning lesson for a young team trying to navigate the next step in its rebuild.
“Definitely,” Grant said. “Definitely. When you’re a younger team, you’ve got to figure out how to win at the end of the games, how to control the pace of the game and things like that. I think Jrue (Holiday’s) been doing a great job for us. Everybody else has got to get on the same page.”
And that, as much as anything, proved to be an insurmountable hurdle Sunday — the Blazers didn’t have Holiday. The veteran starting point guard woke up with a sore right calf, tested the ailment in his pregame warmup and was deemed unavailable about an hour and 15 minutes before tipoff. The Blazers, already playing without injured point guards Scoot Henderson and Blake Wesley, were forced to go without a natural point guard against the Mavericks.
And it showed.
“Jrue does such a great job of controlling the pace and slowing the game down when we need to,” Grant said, “but also kicking (passes) ahead, making sure everybody’s involved, things like that. I think we definitely missed that tonight. So, hopefully we can get him back soon.”
It’s unclear how long Holiday will be sidelined — he declined a postgame interview Sunday — but a lengthy absence would be debilitating.
So the Blazers boarded that flight home late Sunday night, searching for sleep and a way out of their November funk.
Their longest trip so far this season did not go as planned, but they insist it will not derail all of their early-season mojo.
“There’s still a long, long, long season left,” Avdija said. “We’re down a lot of bodies. We’re a little fatigued. But as much as you get negative momentum, you also have positive momentum, so you feel like it’s going to turn.”
Added Splitter: “We’ve all been through these periods. You’re not happy, of course, but it happens. You’ve got to go back to the basics … get better, try to recover, go back home, see our families, recharge and do it again and again and again. That’s the NBA. It doesn’t slow down. It’s 82 games like this and we have a back-to-back coming.”
If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.