Portland Trail Blazers (1-1) vs. Sacramento Kings (0-2) The Sacramento Kings lose their home opener to the Portland Trail Blazers, 112-122, in front of a sellout crowd at Golden 1 Center. The Kings have yet to win a home opener since the opening of the Golden 1 Center. At the half, the score was all tied up at 57 before the Kings allowed Portland to go on a 12-0 run and found themselves down, 57-69 with 9:02 to go in the third quarter. Sacramento still trailed, 65-75, with 6:60 remaining in the third before going on a 9-0 run and cut the deficit to one with the score, 74-75. The Trail Blazers finished the third quarter on a 19-10 run, leading 94-84 to start the fourth quarter. Sacramento started the final frame with a 7-2 run to cut the score to 91-96. The Kings were down just seven points, 97-104, before Damian Lillard went on a 10-4 run on his own to go up by 13 with 4:50 left to play as Sacramento was unable to mount a late fourth quarter comeback. TEAM The Kings shot 37-for-87 from the field (.425%) while allowing Portland to go 46-of-85 (.541) as Sacramento has allowed their first two opponents of the season to shoot over .500%. Last season, the Kings went 6-21 in games where they allowed the opposition to eclipse the .500 shooting percentage threshold. Sacramento made 15 of their 37 attempts (.405%) from beyond the arc, setting a franchise record for 3-pointers in a home opener, which was originally set on Nov. 2, 2009 versus Memphis. The Kings collected 43 rebounds for the game as they outrebounded, Portland recorded 40 boards on the night. Sacramento was 20-10 during the 2018-19 season when outrebounding their opponent. PLAYERS De’Aaron Fox scored a team-high with 28 points on 7-of-18 shooting, including going 11-for-14 from the free throw line as he tied his career-high in free throws made and set a new career-high in attempts from the line. Fox also added five assists and six rebounds. Buddy Hield chipped in 21 points also going 7-for-18 on field goal attempts to go with five rebounds. Bogan Bogdanovic posted 16 points, three assists and three steals. Damian Lillard totaled a game-high 35 points to go along with five rebounds, five assists and three steals. Hassan Whiteside notched 22 points, nine rebounds and three assists and three steals.
Portland Trail Blazers (1-1) vs. Sacramento Kings (0-2) KINGS HEAD COACH LUKE WALTON: “Start with the positive. I thought [De’Aaron] Fox [was] really nice tonight – the way he would start attacking the rim and being our leader out there – that’s what I’m talking about, that was really nice to see from him. Our rebounding – something we challenged ourselves on after getting pushed around in Phoenix – got much better tonight against a team that’s a very good offensive rebounding team with good size on it, so I was happy with that. And then the 3-pointers, that’s kind of what we’re looking to do; the way we got them by penetrating and kicking them out, we got the number we hit. I thought we had some more good looks that we just didn’t make tonight for whatever reason; you’re always going to have nights where you miss shots, but those things I thought were all positives for us tonight. Things that we need to continue to stress on with our guys and get better at are third quarters. We talk about it as a team and the preseason it was for the most part a struggle of ours, in Phoenix it definitely was, tonight it was again – so to come out of the half Our turnovers – very pleased in the first quarter I think we had two, and we won the first quarter. So these are things that we see that we are addressing that we know we need to fix and as we fix them, we will become a better basketball team and give ourselves better chances to win some of these games. And then again our defense, right – this is why we’re stressing defense and we’re not there yet. It takes time, it takes work, but giving Portland 54 percent (from the field), they’re a very good team – it’s a playoff team, they were 2 or 3 in the West last year, they have two All-Stars. They’ve been running this offense for a lot of years and they’re a very good team so give them credit. But we need to be able to get stops and tonight we were not able to.” ON WHERE HE’S MOST CONCERNED AND LOOKING TO ADDRESS DEFENSE FIRST “The league has turned into a pick-and-roll league for the most part; a lot of teams are playing with four shooters out. Tonight there were lineups where Harrison (Barnes) was the center and they had Zach Collins playing center for them so there are small lineups. You have to be able to stop the point of attack which is a lot of times pick-and-roll. So that’s kind of where it starts at and then for us it finishes with those rebounds that we struggled with. I actually thought we had made some nice strides towards the end of the preseason with our defense but it has unfortunately not carried over into the regular season, but it will – we’ll get there.” ON THE THIRD QUARTER STRUGGLES OF THIS TEAM AND WHAT HE WOULD SUGGEST TO GET THAT GOING “You’ve got to make sure that you get out there first and get warm; make sure you’re doing whatever is appropriate for you at that halftime intermission to get your body going again, and then take a breath, mentally check-in, re-center yourself, know ‘Okay here we go again – 24 more minutes’ type of mentality. It sounds easy but it is a challenge, I’ve done it as a player before, sometimes it’s hard to get going, but that’s not an okay excuse. We’ve got to be better as a group with that.”
KINGS GUARD DE’AARON FOX: ON BOTH TEAMS GOING ON RUNS “I think the way the game goes, there are times where we get up seven, eight points, and then they bring it back to five, and then they get it down to two. That’s something we feel like we have to work on. In the third quarter, [Portland] went on a 10-0 run and then we bring it back to one, but then they push it back. That’s stuff that veteran teams do and that’s stuff that we have to learn how to do. Now obviously we feel like we can beat anybody, but it’s just those things when you know it’s a game of runs, you got to try to stop teams’ runs, and I don’t think we did that in the first half. Obviously, we still gave ourselves a chance to win, but that’s what they did in the second half. We will bring it back, they will push it up, we will bring it back, they will push it up, and I mean that’s something that we have to focus on. ” ON DAMIAN LILLARD “I mean Dame’s a great player. That’s always a guy that I enjoy going up against, he makes tough shots, and sometimes he doesn’t have a defensive plan, but you try to make it tough on him and try to come back on the other end in attack mode. But I mean that’s a great player, that’s a great guy. It’s always fun being able to play against him. ” ON IF THE TEAM HAS MADE ENOUGH PROGRESS FROM LAST GAME “Tonight we improved our rebounding. I feel like obviously we went small and they kind of hurt us on the glass, but before that I felt like we did a good job on the glass. I feel like we kept guys in front of us, sometimes they just made some tough shots, but one thing we tried to focus on is that, and I feel like we’ve improved, but obviously there’s a lot to improve on. ”
KINGS GUARD BOGDAN BOGDANOVIC: ON TONIGHT’S RESULT “It’s really tough to open the season this way, but it’s hard to play against those [playoff] teams and they’re a really good team. Again, we played bad in the second half. We have to find a way to play better, especially in the second half. ON DAMIAN LILLARD BEING A SPECIAL PLAYER “Geez, he showed it. I mean he deserves everything in this league and he shows that every single night. He’s not like he came in Sac to not play. You know he was really locked in and he gets his guys going as well, and we catch up to him.”
TRAIL BLAZERS HEAD COACH TERRY STOTTS: “That was a really challenging game. Sacramento plays a style that’s really tough to guard. They push the tempo, they shoot 3s, they played small lineups. I was proud the way we defended during certain stretches. I thought we made most our runs when we defended well. It’s always good to get a road win.” ON KENT BAZEMORE “He’s tough defensively, makes the right basketball plays. I thought the block he made during transition was a turning point for us. We turned it over and he makes a play like that. He does what you need him to do and he doesn’t get caught up in trying to score. He just takes what the game gives him and defensively, he’s up for a challenge.” ON HASSAN WHITESIDE “Hassan was terrific in the fourth quarter. Obviously they played small when they brought Holmes back in, I thought about bringing him back in. Third quarter, he was big for us. Offensively, he was challenging shots at the rim, rebounding. He was a strong impact on the game.” ON ANFERNEE SIMONS “It’s good to see him score. Obviously, that’s his strength and we didn’t have much going on that stretch and he really provided some timely shooting for us.” ON 3-POINT DEFENSE “It’s going to be an emphasis all year. I mean every team shoots 3s, that’s the reality. [The Kings] were getting them in transition. There was poor communication. I don’t know how many they took in the second half. They took 17 the second half. That’s the style. What we need to get better on was the communication in transition because that’s where they made most of them. We just didn’t communicate well at times.”
PORTLAND TRAIL BLAZERS GUARD DAMIAN LILLARD: ON THE FIRST HALF OF THE GAME AND COMING OUT STRONG IN THE SECOND HALF “In the first half we didn’t think we played well at all. So, to come in here in the half with a tie game, opening night for them with the pace they were playing, we felt good about where we were. Coach talked about the adjustments we needed to make defensively, our communication, our physicality and we executing our defensive game plan better. On offense, he said, we’re doing good things, we’re getting good looks. We just have to keep being aggressive and stop allowing them to have so much time at the other end of the floor. The past game against Phoenix was a similar story for them. They played really well in the first half and then Phoenix kind of took over the game in the second half. We wanted to do that same thing and we were able to come out and assert ourselves starting the third quarter and pretty much controlled the game through the finish.” ON KENT BAZEMORE AND WHAT YOU LIKED ABOUT HIS PERFORMANCE TONIGHT “I mean the same thing I’ve always liked about it, except he’s on my team now. He makes shots, he makes plays, and he got his nose in there all the time. On the glass, guarding everybody on the floor, getting deflections, just coming up with big plays, even when he’s fouling. It’s almost a dead play where we’re about to give up a basket and he fouls a guy and won’t just let him get two. That’s something that he hangs his head on. He does that consistently.” ON HASSAN WHITESIDE COMING OUT WITH A THREE POINTER TO START THE GAME “That’s who he is. That’s who he is. If we’re going to be the team we want to be, him coming off the bench, we’re going to need him to score. To be aggressive, to be confident, whether the shots are going in or not going in. He has the kind of ability, when he sees one go in, then that can turn into three, four and five. I think everybody was happy to see him. Happy to see the ball go in. He played a huge part in the game being tied in the first half. Even though we didn’t play great, but he gave us such great effort.”
PORTLAND TRAIL BLAZERS GUARD/FORWARD KENT BAZEMORE: ON THE OVERALL GAME TONIGHT “We banded as a unit down the stretch. We absorbed some big runs from them. We have to give them credit they kept coming. Dame [Damian Lillard] was special. It’s my first time seeing it on his side. It was special to watch. He kept getting stops down the stretch and the game plan really came into fruition there for us late.” ON BEING ABLE TO HAVE BOTH OFFENSE AND DEFENSE ON BOTH ENDS OF THE COURT TONIGHT “It was good to see the ball go in, but that will come. As you find your rhythm, you get use to things and you let the jitters out. My defense is going to be the constant thing for me, regardless if the shots falling or not. So, I just want to find other ways to impact the game. We got two of the best scorers at their position in the league. My job is to go out there and disrupt.”
