Sloppy Third Quarter Does Trail Blazers In Against Thunder

📍PORTLAND, Ore. — 12 turnovers in a quarter is hard to recover from against anyone, but especially an inner-circle contender.

If you want one stat to show why the Trail Blazers lost a game to Oklahoma City by 23 points that was tied at halftime, that’s it.

After trailing by 17 points to the Thunder midway through the second quarter, the Blazers clawed back to even the score at the half. It was their best stretch of play of the entire season. Everything they say they want to be—a team that pushes the pace, defends and attacks—they were for about six minutes.

Against a team this good, it was too good to last. Those 12 third-quarter turnovers led to 19 Thunder points and Oklahoma City blew the game open.

The final score makes this game look like exactly what it was: the best team in the west playing one of the two worst teams in the west. But there was one thing the Blazers did well on Friday, that had been an insurmountable hurdle in their worst losses to this point.

Friday was Portland’s best three-point shooting night of the season. They finished the night 15-for-35 from deep, with only four fewer makes than the Thunder, who attempted 49 threes. Not counting one Duop Reath hit in garbage time, seven different Blazers players knocked down at least one. Rayan Rupert hit a career-high four, and Jerami Grant and Toumani Camara each hit three.

By and large, they were good looks. And more importantly, they were getting them up. In their two previous double-digit losses, against Golden State and Sacramento, they made single-digit threes. Against the Kings, they shot just 4-of-22 from behind the arc.

Outside of Grant and Anfernee Simons (who shot 1-for-3 from deep on Friday and 1-for-8 overall), the Blazers’ roster isn’t like the Thunder, littered with guys teams feel they need to guard out there. Rupert and Camara could become consistent threats in time. Deni Avdija’s shooting took a big jump last season in Washington that hasn’t carried over so far this season. But that isn’t going to stop them from trying them.

“I want us to let it go,” Chauncey Billups said before the game. “There’s a time and a feel to it, I don’t want our guys shooting a three with 22 seconds left on the shot clock, but I want us to be able to let those go. We work on it a ton. We get those looks a lot of times, because we don’t have a ton of guys who have a huge reputation for shooting it, and so teams are willing to live with that. And so am I, if we can create it the right way.”

The proliferation of three-pointers has become a divisive subject in the first week-and-a-half of the 2024-25 NBA season. It has been for a while—really, since the rise of the Warriors a decade ago—but the Celtics tying the single-game record for threes made in a game on opening night, and then missing 13 in a row in the closing minutes trying to break it, have made the subject impossible to ignore.

Wherever any coach lands on it, they all recognize that it’s just the way of the world under the current rules—if you have the personnel to do it.

“If I had Boston’s roster, where they don’t have one guy that’s not a shooter, I’d want to shoot as many threes as I could,” Billups said. “That means I could score more. But it’s all based on the roster that you have. With where the game has gone, the more threes, the better for most teams. If you’re us, you don’t have a deadly three-point shooting team yet. We’ve got to find other ways to score. We’ve got to crash the offensive glass.”

The Blazers have a long way to go before they’re the Celtics or the Thunder team that beat them on Friday. Portland and Oklahoma City are the two youngest teams in the NBA, and one of them is playing for June and the other is playing for lottery balls. Games like this one make it clear how far away they are from each other despite being close in age.

“We need to do a better job of attacking and making the extra pass,” Camara said. “It’s all about maturing. We’re still [one of] the youngest teams. I hate using that as an excuse, but it’s a fact. So we just need to embrace it and realize what we need to get better at.”