The Portland Trail Blazers found themselves in a familiar position today, trapped in a dogfight for their lives facing a considerably less motivated team without their best players.
It wasn’t easy; in fact, “easy” is a proposition this team and its fans may just have to give up on down the stretch of this restart, but Portland was able to keep its 9th place position intact by defeating the Philadelphia 76ers 124-121 behind 51 points from Damian Lillard.
Many of the themes from yesterday’s fiasco with the Clippers could just be copy/pasted here: good offense; unrecognizable defense and formerly unassuming role players making the Blazers look silly — just substitute Alec Burks here for Rodney McGruder.