We did miss Batum on this one. Web was doing a fine job on 'Melo tonight - but I think that two dedicated defenders would have probably helped - because he played like a man on fire tonight.
Meh. You still gotta knock at least one of them down, Gregory. Some of the blame must fall on his shoulders.
give us Overtime at least. Now the espn's first sentence: Greg Oden bricked 2 free throws with 5 seconds left....
Please. Roy missed some FT. Miller did as well. LMA missed one. They played well, Denver played better. No one needs to be ashamed of this. Good game, they will have better ones.
I think Brandon missing a free throw, and Andre missing a free throw were bad. And LaMarcus missing one late too. The team played nervous, like they were intimidated by it being on national TV, or against Denver. Holy crap, am I reading the boxscore correct? Portland had 7 turnovers?
portland shot 7-12 on their free throws in the last 5 minutes. it's not all on greg because he only missed two. denver shot 11-12 on their free throws in the last 5 minutes. any of the blazers make one more of theirs and it's a different game.
That's exactly right. Denver wanted this one more than we did. They got three or four offensive rebounds in the last two minutes, after not having gotten any in the first half! They poured it on when they had to, and the Blazers didn't. Period.
If Blake, Travis, or Joel had missed those, there would be a ton of posts to trade them and for Nate being an idiot for having them in. Instead, Nate had Greg in, Greg got an offensive opportunity, he didn't convert, and people are taking a bigger picture look. Any time we have problems it doesn't fall on the shoulder of one player, coach, or GM. Hopefully some people can reflect back to this night when they want to blame someone else for our shortcomings.
Or we could run more, look at Denvers roster and look at ours. There's no way they could out run us especially on a back to back night.
Trouble is....I don't want Greg taking too much to heart! His "confidence" or lack of, is why he missed them both! Someone needs to tell him that those two misses were not the misses that lost the game! Rather, the combination of Roy's, Miller's and LMA's misses are what cost us the game down the stretch! We're just playing with no rhythm. Odd substitutions, and what was the "twin tower" experiment in game two of the season? Come on Nate - you have two foul-proned players and you play them together? Makes no sense! Observations: Howard did fine - but Nate kept him on the court a few too many minutes. LMA? Where is our Multi-million dollar stud power forward? I haven't seen him show up in the first two games! Webster played aggressive. But start Miller at the point and Rudy at the 3 and get a lead in the 1st quarter! What happened to Travis? Consolidation is a must.
+1. I never want the big guy to take things too hard. I'm not a fan of throwing the other guys under the bus, but I think Nate and his teammates will remind him that it's not his fault and they believe in him. Based off what we've seen out of GO, he's going to take it hard no matter what anyone says, because the guy cares.
