Trail Blazers 117, Spurs 110: What We Saw

14 games into the season, the Trail Blazers are a quarter of the way to their preseason over-under win total. At 10-4, they currently have the best record in the Western Conference. Tuesday's win over San Antonio was ugly and sloppy, but they did enough. Here are the sights, sounds and observations, plus the Jerseys of the Night.

• The big news of the night was the Blazers debuting their PDX carpet-themed City Edition jerseys. I was lukewarm on them when they announced them last week, but they look a lot better in person. And I saw a lot of them in the crowd already. Mostly Damian Lillards, but a good number of Shaedon Sharpes as well.

• The team seems to like them, although one player I talked to about it in the locker room before the game couldn't process the idea that anyone has a strong opinion about any airport carpet. He made the point that in most airports, you have no idea what the carpet even looks like.
• Even more so than the jerseys, I love the team's new warmup jackets. I don't own or wear any Blazers gear because my job is to cover the team, not be a fan of the team. But if that weren't the case, I'd buy one of these immediately.

• Newly crowned WNBA MVP and champion A'ja Wilson was in the building, presumably in town on Nike business.
• This game was my first time watching the Spurs extensively this season, so forgive me for the obvious observation, but I'm a big fan of Jeremy Sochan's game. He can't shoot yet, but he does pretty much everything else well and seems like he'd be incredibly annoying to play against. Seems like a cool guy, too.
• Sochan was supposed to work out for the Blazers in June leading up to the draft, but was ultimately unable to. The workout group he was scheduled to be in also included Sharpe, whom the Blazers ultimately took with the No. 7 overall pick.
• Sharpe was once again excellent on Tuesday night, scoring 13 points in 23 minutes off the bench on 5-of-7 shooting with two three-pointers. He made one rookie mistake, attempting to save a ball from going out of bounds but tapping it right to a Spurs player. But his most impressive moment of the night was a missed dunk over Isaiah Roby that would have been, by far, his best of the season if he'd made it, which is already a high bar to clear.
• A rough night for Jusuf Nurkic, who is still battling adductor soreness and was a -21 in 15 minutes in a game the Blazers won by seven. Jakob Poeltl had a career-high 31 points, many of which came directly at Nurkic's expense. Chauncey Billups opted to go with Drew Eubanks for much of the game, and Eubanks played his best game of the season.
• Justise Winslow missed the game with a non-COVID illness. Keon Johnson remained out with a hip injury.
• After greatly cleaning up the turnovers in the final two games of the road trip against New Orleans and Dallas, Portland gave the ball up 17 times leading to 31 Spurs points. And many of their turnovers Tuesday night were particularly ugly, simply passes out of bounds to no one. I asked Billups about this after the game: "We gave out a few souvenirs tonight to some fans. I just think that a couple times, we sped up and we're supposed to be in certain spots. And when we're in those spots and really clicking, you know where a guy is going to be. Sometimes when we're not, it looks pretty bad. But I thought that even some of the ones that weren't turnovers, they deflected a lot of balls and it messed with the timing of some of our passes. "

Jerseys of the Night

Where do we land on getting a custom jersey in the current style of a player from the 1977 team? I tend to not like it, but in this guy's defense, Mitchell & Ness isn't making a Dave Twardzik throwback, so he didn't have many options.