It seemed impossible last Sunday, coming off the lifeless 45-point less to Memphis, that the Trail Blazers would end that same homestand with the vibes as good as they’ve ever been since the start of the rebuild.
Three wins in a row will do that.
Looking at their schedule when it was announced in August, they would have been lucky to have three wins, total, before the end of the calendar year. Before their three-day break this week, they played five games in seven nights; they’re about to start another stretch of just about nonstop games. Sunday afternoon’s win over Atlanta was the first game they played all season against an Eastern Conference team, and they won’t play another one until Indiana a week from Wednesday to close out their upcoming five-game road trip.
They’ve now had the same number of three-game winning streaks that they had all of last season. And they won these three games the exact way they want to win games: with defense and big performances from players—Donovan Clingan against the Timberwolves, Shaedon Sharpe twice in a row on Wednesday and Sunday—that, in an ideal world, will still be here when the Blazers are competing for the playoffs again.
It was unthinkable a week ago that they’d be in this position. But they haven’t just come out the other side of that disastrous loss with morale intact.
They’ve weathered it and started creating a blueprint for what the final product of this rebuild could look like when they have the kind of high-end talent they need to win in a real way.
“Anybody that sleeps well tonight, you're a loser,” Chauncey Billups told his team in the locker room after the Grizzlies blowout. And if that’s what he was willing to share publicly, imagine the version of that speech he gave behind closed doors.
“He was fired up,” Clingan said after practice the following day. “He was mad, and he had every right to be. We didn't show up to play the way we were supposed to.”
Clingan hasn’t lost like that very much in his high-school or college career, but having played for Dan Hurley at UConn, what Billups said to the team was light.
“He told us what we needed to hear,” Robert Williams III said. “We played soft. We laid down. He hates that, we hate that. We're trying to build a model here for the team, but we know exactly what we did wrong.”
Their practice the day after the loss wasn’t much of a practice. They didn’t do a lot of on-court work. Some film, but mostly a lot of talking about what happened the night before and how to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.
It wasn’t a players-only meeting like a lot of these meetings are after losses like that. Billups and the rest of the coaching staff were involved.
“It was Chauncey starting us off,” Toumani Camara said. “As the head coach, that's something he's been doing, to show us that he's trying to lead us in the best way that he can. A lot of us participated in the conversation. I think everyone had their role to be played. We have a lot of leaders on the team that were vocal. It's something that's needed. In every situation, even with families, when you work with people, you can't just keep your feelings to yourself if you want things to work out. Being able to have a safe space and being able to talk to each other I think is crucial for our team. I think it was very productive to be able to have the whole coaching staff and the whole team talking, and just say whatever is on your heart. At the end of the day, we're humans, we're not robots, so we're just trying to figure out a way to work together.”
The Blazers had a few games like that last season. An early January road trip was full of them, including a 62-point loss in Oklahoma City, and then they lost again by 60 in Miami in March. This one felt worse for a few reasons. For one, it came so early in the season. They also had their full team (minus Matisse Thybulle, who hasn’t played yet this season), so they couldn’t use the injury excuse for why things went so sideways. But most importantly, that performance was out of character for the team they were for most of the first three weeks of the season. For the most part leading into that game, the Blazers lost a lot, but they competed.
“We had a good few games to start the season, and then lost a little bit of trust in each other and started to build it back up,” Scoot Henderson said. “That's all that is. We've just got to find a way to be consistent with that. Be consistent with trusting each other still, up or down.”