Blazers Blog: Postgame Had A “Maybe Next Year” Vibe

The Portland Trail Blazers have been through a ton of adversity this season. Every time something bad happened, they pushed through and overachieved.

But after a second consecutive blowout loss to the Suns in the playoffs, the Blazers might be out of pushes. Jason Richardson followed up his 29-point performance in Game 2 with a 42-point performance in Game 3, causing the Blazers electric crowd to quiet quickly. When it was all said and done, the Blazers showed much less fight than anyone anticipated.

Ben Golliver of SB Nation’s Blazers blog Blazers Edge, who covers every Blazers home game, writes today that the postgame vibe was particularly depressing.

Indeed the post-game interviews had a distinct post-mortem vibe. Jason, how did it feel to kill them? Nate, how did they kill you? Alvin, how much did you enjoy watching Jason kill them? Who knows. Maybe I watch too many episodes of The First 48.

Whether Jason Richardson -- in going 13 of 19 from the field and 8 of 12 from deep for a playoff career high 42 points -- dealt the death blow to the Blazers’ 2009-2010 season remains to be seen. But in the way the Blazers absolutely folded under pressure, in the boos that came down as the deficit hit 25 points in the second quarter and in the voice of Nate McMillan afterwards, a man who sounded like he trying to convince himself that his team was only down and not out, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where this doesn’t end badly, and abruptly, for Portland.

“The second half, we won that,” Nate McMillan said afterwards, in a mesmerizing display of straw grasping. “We started to play basketball, we started to fight. We won both of those quarters. Somehow we got to get that fight, that scrappiness at the start of the game.” The relentless motivator, the unbending optimist had nothing besides a solid but not nearly enough late 3rd and early 4th quarter push to build off of.

Here’s hoping the Blazers find another gear and make this a series again. They’ve done it all year, so why can’t they do it again?