Believe it or not, portland trail blazers Two years ago today, I was playing basketball.
no it wasn’t NBA Summer League Or some pointless expedition. Portland was playing serious, high-level basketball with postseason implications. The basketball that made Damien Lillard act like a man possessed.
On July 31, 2020, the Blazers played the first game of their bizarre NBA bubble in Orlando, Florida. It was a very entertaining 140-135 overtime win. memphis grizzlies.
The 2019-2020 NBA restart in Orlando was the league’s answer to the COVID-19 pandemic, coming four months after the season ended in March and at a time when no vaccine existed. But as the old saying goes, The show must go on and everyone likes moneyThus was born the Walt Disney World-placed bubble.
Starting in late July, los angeles lakers At the October Championship, the bubble has one of the weirdest basketball vibes I’ve ever seen. Live fans were not allowed in, so they were featured on a giant video board. Spectator noise streamed through the stadium’s speakers. Players were also unable to leave campus or make physical contact with people in the outside world — Even if you just received Uber Eats.
The bubble allowed 22 teams to participate, consisting of 16 teams in playoff positions and the remaining six teams within six games of the conference’s eighth seed. Everyone’s and Mother’s Shooting Rate Soars Because they didn’t deal with depth perception in large arenas or noisy remote crowds.
After months of being robbed of live sports content, the festival was a treat to watch, at least for this writer.
Blazers join Orlando with 29-37 record — 3 1⁄2 The game returned to Memphis with the 8th seed — and multiple stories. The Bubble’s debut saw the return of Blazers big men Jusuf Nurkic and Zach Collins. The NBA has pacified teams like Portland on the fringes of playoff contention by scheduling his play-in tournament between the eighth and ninth seeds in each conference. and Lillard, He famously said he would only go to Orlando if Portland could make the playoffs.were desperate to win Portland for the seventh straight season.
With the Blazers well behind Memphis, each of Portland’s eight “seed games” has a very thin margin of error and a unique intensity. It all started on July 31 against Memphis.
Former Blazer CJ McCallum led Portland with 33 points. Lillard scored 29 in the trailer for the wild performance to come. And Gary Trent Jr. kicked off one of the hottest shooting stretches of his young career, scoring four triples and 17 points off the bench.
The ‘Hero of the Game’ title might have to go to Carmelo Anthony, who scored 21 off the bench. In one of his brightest moments as a Blazer, Melo saw him score two crucial 3-pointers in his final 90 seconds of regulation to ensure Portland went into overtime. Did.
The Blazers scored an 11-0 run in OT to fend off a Grizzlies comeback to take the win.
Portland finished the seeding game with a 6-2 record, with many of the same heart-pounding developments. Lillard was unanimously named Bubble MVP, averaging 37.6 points and 9.6 assists in his eight-seeded games.
Portland won their last three must-win games by a total of seven points, and Lillard scored a staggering 154 points in those games alone. It was a good enough result that the Blazers qualified for the play-in tournament as the No. 8 seed, and a rematch was set up between the young Grizzlies and rookie star Jahi Morant.
Morant and the Grizzlies are today’s contenders, but at the time Portland sent 126 to 122 young guns to complete Lillard’s playoff mission.
Ultimately, Portland’s blistering run in the bubble ended unexpectedly in the first round of the playoffs.
But Bubble Basketball still provided Blazers fans with thrilling games and the greatest Damien Lillard performance of all time.
Two years later, the event serves as an intriguing time capsule of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fans, what do you remember about the Portland run in Orlando? Let us know in the comments below!
