For One Quarter, an Anfernee Simons Explosion

📍 PORTLAND, Ore. — Anfernee Simons’ night was one of the weirdest in recent memory.

With seven minutes and 33 seconds left in the second quarter of the Trail Blazers’ 137-131 Sunday loss to the Dallas Mavericks, Simons picked up his third foul. Chauncey Billups motioned for him to come out of the game. Simons waved him off. On the very next possession, he picked up his fourth foul and didn’t play again for the rest of the half.

Then, the third quarter hit, and Simons couldn’t miss. He hit a pull-up three less than a minute into the quarter and didn’t let up. The back-and-forth shotmaking between him and Luka Doncic (who finished the night with a pedestrian 36 points, seven rebounds and 13 assists) was one of the more impressive displays you’ll see at the Moda Center this season. It was the closest thing to one of Damian Lillard’s heaters that there’s been since Lillard left town.

“After you see three shots go in in a row, that’s when you know,” Simons said after the game. “The way they go in, you’re shooting them and it’s a pretty clean make. After that, you’re like, ‘Alright, I’ll keep testing it and see if it keeps going in.’ So I kept shooting, got a couple of wide-open looks. They left me open.”

The only thing that could slow Simons down—because none of the Dallas defenders could—was his fifth foul, which he committed with 12 seconds remaining in the period. Billups had to pull him again. He came back in with a little over eight minutes left in the game, and on the very next play, picked up a loose-ball foul. His night was done.

“It’s hard being in foul trouble when you’re rolling like that,” he said. “Luka’s already looking for me because I’m the shortest guy on the court, and now I’m in foul trouble, and then going into halftime, I’m like, ‘Now he’ll for sure be looking for me. I’ve got four fouls.’ But I was able to get away from it and score a little bit. I couldn’t be as aggressive on defense as I wanted to.”

Simons scored 24 of his 27 points on 8-of-9 shooting in the third quarter. His coach, who has been in the league for a long time, had never seen anything like his night—this kind of tear for one quarter in a game otherwise completely hampered by foul trouble.

“That’s a first for me,” Billups said. “He was in an amazing groove, and then had to come out. That was crazy. Fouling out on the first play. Just checked in, just a weird play, just an instinctual play. Just unfortunate.”

Simons’ shotmaking kept the Blazers in it during that quarter. Their defense in the second half gave them a chance to win. An offensive goaltending call against Toumani Camara that would have given them the lead late was one turning point; a successful challenge from Jason Kidd that overturned an offensive foul call to give Dallas free throws was another.

It’s not often a team scores 131 points and shoots 58 percent both from the field and from three-point range and loses, but that’s what the Blazers managed on Sunday. Still, there was plenty to like—another good night at both ends from Deni Avdija, who’s finally settled into something close to what he was last season in Washington over the last two weeks, a strong defensive performance from Camara on Doncic, the return of Jerami Grant to the lineup after missing the last two games with a knee injury.

It was a near-perfect loss for a rebuilding team. A fun display of shotmaking, a ramped-up defensive effort late, good performances from important foundational players, a few mental lapses that are teachable moments, another lottery ball for the ledger.

Losses that look like this count the same as the blowouts in the standings. Billups has talked often about there being ways he’s willing to lose and ways he’s not willing to lose. This was one of the former.

“Absolutely,” Billups said. “When we lay it on the line and give it all we have, we’ll live with the results any day. I thought we did that.”