Trail Blazers Entering Make-or-Break Stretch for Play-In Hopes

📍PORTLAND, Ore. — If the Trail Blazers are going to make the play-in, they’re going to do it over the next two weeks. And they have their work cut out for them.

After Sunday night’s hard-fought loss to the Detroit Pistons, the Blazers remained the same number of games—four—back from the 10th-seeded Dallas Mavericks that they’ve been for almost a week. The Mavericks lost on Sunday as well, to the team standing between Portland and Dallas, the Phoenix Suns. The Suns are now two and a half games up on Portland for 11th and just a game and a half back from Dallas. The Sacramento Kings, who lost to the L.A. Clippers on Sunday, have a two-game lead over the Mavericks for ninth, so they aren’t in the clear for falling out of the play-in, either.

If you ask Blazers players whether they’re standings-watching during this time, you’ll get different answers.

“For sure, I’m looking,” said Anfernee Simons, who led the Blazers with 30 points on Sunday, 24 of which came during a second-half comeback. “I looked at Phoenix today, and their schedule is pretty hard. If we can put a couple [wins] together and they lose, we give ourselves a chance to move up a little. Dallas losing Kyrie [Irving] sucks, but maybe they lose a couple games and bump themselves out. We’re watching Sacramento as well. We’re looking at those teams and thinking we could possibly be in that bubble at the end of the season if we get on a roll and put ourselves in that position.”

“At the end of the day, we control what we can control,” Toumani Camara said. “So we just focus on the day-to-day. We don’t really focus on what other teams are doing. We can’t do nothing about it, whether they win or lose. If we get to the point where we’re one game away, it will come more into play. But I feel like as of today, we’re just trying to stack up wins and get better as a team.”

The Blazers aren’t out of it, but with 17 games remaining, the window is getting tighter, and the schedule isn’t doing them any favors.

Sunday began a stretch of eight of nine games at home—they play Golden State tomorrow on a back-to-back, and then have a seven-game homestand over the next two weeks. But it also began a stretch of seven of those nine games against playoff teams, the kind the Blazers have struggled to beat throughout their unexpected hot stretch in the second half of the season.

Of the eight teams they face in the next two weeks before heading out on their last extended road trip of the year, only two—Toronto and Washington—are lottery teams. The rest is a gauntlet: the Warriors, Knicks, Grizzlies, Nuggets, Celtics and Cavaliers.

“I know our schedule isn’t easy, either,” Simons said. “Nobody’s schedule is easy in that bubble. We need to really string some wins together to give ourselves a chance. We’re going to fight.”

Since the Jan. 19 over the Bulls that began this unexpected play-in push, the Blazers are 2-7 in the nine games they’ve played against teams that are currently in the top six in their respective conferences.

Not that the teams ahead of them are on solid footing, either. The Mavericks, having lost Irving for the season to a torn ACL, Anthony Davis indefinitely with a groin injury and still reeling organizationally from the Luka Doncic trade last month, very well could plummet in the standings. And the Suns always seem to be on the verge of an implosion.

“We’re still not out of it,” Simons said. “Obviously, every win is going to count. We had a chance to win this game. We played well. Certain plays didn’t go our way. I think we played well this game. The last few, we played terrible. But we’ve been playing well recently and we have to just keep plugging away and play the way we play.”