Post-Game: Blazers vs. Suns, Game 6

At the tail end of that 17-7 delirium, LaMarcus Aldridge stepped up to the line to shoot the potential tying and leading free throws. He took a quick breath, put it up, and saw it harmlessly bounce off the rim. A thousand fans behind the basket cringed simultaneously, stopping their jumps, clenching their fists, trying to look away. That was our last gasp. We couldn't take it.

Believe me, it was there for the taking. The Blazers played the kind of defense they needed to win the game, holding the Suns under 100 points. The Suns even coughed up the ball 17 times, giving us plenty of opportunities to pay for their carelessness. The Suns even only shot 52% from the free throw line (including a Louis Amundson airball that I truly want to take credit for the creation of). The home court advantage was there in spades. The opportunity was ripe.

Then, our two best players simply couldn't step up enough to win the game. Combined, LaMarcus Aldridge and Brandon Roy shot 9-33. That's the ballgame, right there. It doesn't matter that Martell Webster was looking to redeem his whole season and auditioning for sticking around on the team next year. Rudy's first appearance in what seems like months didn't make anything happen. Bayless' hot play wasn't enough. The Blazers needed something even remotely resembling production from their two best players, and the production wasn't there. Instead, we got traps on Roy at the top of the arc, and bricked jumpers from LaMarcus. The futility is summed up in Brandon's 1-8 mark from three.

Now, we can't analyze this game without noticing Nate's completely changed (for the worse) substitution pattern. The first man off the bench, to the delight of any fan who has actually watched a game in the last two months, was Dante Cunningham, and not Juwan Howard. Dante Cunningham stepped up accordingly, filling the stat sheet in a tragically low 9 minutes of play with 5 rebounds, 2 steals and 2 points. Despite this flirtation with smart substituting, Nate decided to get Juwan his minutes elsewhere, this time by taking them from Marcus Camby. There is absolutely no logic to this. The man, in 16 minutes of play, tallied a rebound, and no points. There may be some ballyhoo over the substitution at the end of the run for Roy over Bayless. The real problem was no Camby for Juwan. We forfeited our defense, and Phoenix walked right in for easy buckets.

Still, the fans continued on, even as the game became more and more unreachable, as the Suns hit one dagger after another. In the waning moments of the game, the fans let out one last cheer to let the Blazers know how much what they did meant to them. During the "Let's-Go-Blazers" chant, even Louis Amundson was joining in on the Suns bench.

The Blazers gave it their all, and this season, after so many injuries and so much turmoil, that all just wasn't enough.