On one side of the Portland Trail Blazers locker room, Jerami Grant looked beleaguered.
He was exhausted, famished and sick, visibly showing the effects of a two-day bug that left him nauseous and drained.
On the other side of the locker room, Toumani Camara was reeling from a different kind of pain altogether.
“It was completely my fault,” the Blazers’ defensive stalwart said of his team’s heartbreaking 122-121 defeat to the Chicago Bulls at the Moda Center.
Let’s back up.
As the Blazers prepared to host the Bulls Wednesday night in the second game of a back-to-back, it seemed an impossibility that they would offer much resistance. The injury-riddled group, which already had been playing without all three of its point guards, suffered another blow before tipoff, when starting shooting guard Shaedon Sharpe underwent magnetic resonance imaging testing on a sore right calf that forced him to miss his first game of the season.
It left the reeling Blazers without seven players, including their second-leading scorer (Sharpe), their leader in assists (Jrue Holiday) and a pair of defensive pests that had helped shape their early-season identity (Matisse Thybulle and Blake Wesley). The litany of absences thrust a mix of two-way players and end-of-the-bench backups into the rotation. One of the two-way players (Sidy Cissoko) started at guard and another starter (Grant) spent most of Tuesday and some of Monday vomiting.
It’s hard to imagine that many among the 17,795 at the Moda Center expected a close game, let alone a win, especially since the Blazers had been run out of the gym a night earlier by the Phoenix Suns. And sure enough, when Chicago backup guard Ayo Dosunmu completed an alley-oop layup with 9:16 left in the fourth quarter, the Bulls snatched their biggest lead of the game, 109-88, and it looked like the Blazers would go down without a fight.
Instead, they delivered one of their most inspirational quarters of the season.
All of a sudden, Deni Avdija was knocking down threes and bulldozing his way to the hoop. Donovan Clingan was manhandling rebounds and diving to the floor for loose balls. Kris Murray was harassing ball-handlers and finishing at the rim. And Grant was knocking down shots even though he had only managed to keep down a little bread and water all day.
Before you knew it, the Blazers had erupted for a 21-3 run to make it a one-possession game. When Avdija swished a three-pointer with 1:22 left and followed with a drive-and-dish to Clingan underneath the basket for a three-point play, the Blazers stunningly led 119-116 with 47.3 seconds left.
“It was outstanding grit,” interim coach Tiago Splitter said of his team’s comeback. “Fighting. A lot of guys playing a lot of minutes in a row.”
But in the end, the Blazers came up a few seconds — and a couple free throws — short. Avdija and Grant had two backbreaking misses over the final 16.2 seconds that would have left Bill Schonely incredulous.
After one ill-timed miss from Avdija, Coby White swished a clutch three-pointer with 9.1 seconds left, trimming the Blazers’ lead to 120-119. After another ill-timed miss by Grant with 8.2 seconds left, which made the score 121-119, White and Nikola Vucevic handed the Blazers another heartbreaker.
On a side inbounds play near the Bulls’ bench, White gathered a pass and drove toward the hoop on Murray, seemingly charging toward a game-tying shot attempt. Instead, when White reached the paint, he spun into Camara, who had darted away from Vucevic on the perimeter to offer Murray help. White felt the pinch and passed out of the double team, firing an off-balance heave to Vucevic.
The Bulls’ center gathered the pass and launched a three, which swished at the buzzer, touching off a Chicago celebration that spilled toward the other end of the court.
A little while later, in that beleaguered Blazers locker room, the team’s defensive heart and soul pointed the blame at himself.
“I overhelped,” Camara 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.”
At the start of the play, Camara was guarding White. But amid a flurry of screens and actions, Camara switched onto Vucevic, then abandoned the big man for the game-winner.
The costly blunder left Camara in a postgame fit and he said he would stew over it all night.
“I don’t need to watch film,” he said, when asked if he had seen a highlight of the final play. “I’m probably not going to sleep tonight. It’s probably going to be in my head all night.”
While no one could deny the gaffe, teammates and coaches flooded to Camara’s aid. Damian Lillard told Camara: “We live and we grow.” Cissoko told Camara: “Basketball is a game of mistakes. You’ve just got to move forward.” Splitter noted that it was hardly the Blazers’ only blunder against the Bulls.
“Somebody made a mistake and that’s part of the game,” he 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 make 21 threes. We talked about that before the game. So it’s not one play. It’s a sum of many plays.”
But the sum of the plays ultimately added up to another loss for the Blazers (6-9), which was their seventh in the last nine games. That hope-inspiring start to the season? Those impressive wins over Oklahoma City, Denver and Golden State? It all seems like a distant memory as injuries and illnesses have become the story of the Blazers, reversing all that positive early-season mojo.
At the very least, there was plenty of fight in this shorthanded team, which battled back from a 21-point fourth-quarter deficit to nearly steal a win.
Avdija was electric in defeat, finishing with 32 points, 11 rebounds and 11 assists to record his first triple-double of the season. Grant was inspiring amid illness, producing 33 points, nine rebounds and four assists over 37 gutsy minutes. And Clingan was a beast in the middle, scoring a season-high 17 points and hauling in a career-high 21 rebounds.
The Blazers stumbled again, but they offered hope they can still compete, even with seven players on the injured list.
“I don’t think that’s ever been a doubt in this team,” Camara said. “Everybody knows the potential that we have. We spent a lot of time this summer together, so we know what we’re capable of. It’s the second time we get beat like that on a buzzer-beater, so it’s kind of painful. … You’ve just got to move forward. We have 67 more games.”
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