The Portland Trail Blazers clocked in for a relatively easy night at the home office Monday against the Washington Wizards. Portland won comfortably, 112-97, but the margin felt larger as essentially the entire fourth quarter was mop-up time.
“I felt good about our start to the game,” Portland head coach Chauncey Billups said. “I thought we were very focused at the start, so it gave me a good feeling about the rest of the night.”
Billups got that optimistic feeling despite the Wizards going ahead 23-15 around the midway mark of the first quarter, and the good omen he saw proved correct. The Blazers flipped that seven-point deficit to a seven-point lead by the end of the first quarter. Then they soundly took care of business at the start of the second half to put the rest of the game on cruise-control mode.
“Obviously, a team that young will come off to a hot start and be energetic,” Portland guard Anfernee Simons said about the Wizards. “Then we sustained that, and we were able to pull away for a majority of the third and fourth quarter.”
Simons dropped a cool 30 on 10-17 shooting and five triples before ending his night early at the 10:23 mark of the fourth quarter with the Blazers up by 24. Simons’ starting backcourt mate Shaedon Sharpe floated for three athletic dunks on his way to 16 points and five rebounds. Backup center Duop Reath emerged from a recent shooting slump to post 15 points on 5-11 shooting from the field, even getting busy at the rim with two dunks of his own.
“He hadn’t been making his shots, and then tonight he goes 3-6 from 3 which is a big deal,” Billups said about Reath. “It just changes how you have to guard us a lot of times when he’s playing the backup five. He was good on both sides of the ball.”
Blazers wing Matisse Thybulle followed up his feel-good regular-season debut Sunday against the Toronto Raptors with another stellar defensive performance Monday. He looked like a varsity cornerback picking on freshmen wide receivers, flying around the court for five steals in 22 minutes. Forward Kris Murray also added four steals, part of a team total of 15. The pair helped pick up a lot of the defensive slack on a night defensive stalwart Toumani Camara was out of the lineup due to calf soreness.
“I thought our pressure and our deflections and steals really kept us where we needed to be,” Billups said.
It should be noted, the Wizards deployed some shameless substitution chicanery similar to what the Raptors did at the Moda Center 24 hours earlier — seemingly with the objective of ensuring a loss for Draft Lottery odds. The Wizards didn’t bother playing starters Jordan Poole and Khris Middleton in the second half, playing both players just under 11 minutes. Make of that decision what you will...
Regardless, the Blazers have had difficulty getting up for games against teams when key players weren’t on the court. Case in point, Portland barely prevailed in that down-to-the-wire win versus Toronto just the other day. There was no such issue against Washington. The Blazers got the job done thoroughly in a mid-March contest that felt a lot like a formality.
Even the nature and length of the Blazers’ postgame interviews reflected the relative uneventfulness in this one. Billups spoke for just a little over two minutes, Simons for less than a minute and a half.
Not too much to discuss. Onto the next one.