After a rough loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Los Angeles Lakers looked to get back on track when they traveled to take on the Portland Trail Blazers on Saturday night.
Unfortunately, the Lakers again could not get it down without LeBron James are they were blown out by Portland, 105-90, in a game that was never really close.
Trail Blazers star Damian Lillard came into this game struggling, scoring just four points in his last game. So naturally, he came out firing with 10 points in the first five minutes.
It wasn’t just Lillard that came out hot though as it was seemingly the entire Trail Blazers team. Meanwhile, the Lakers couldn’t buy a bucket early and the result was a 36-14 deficit at the end of the first quarter.
Not only were the Lakers without James, but they were also without Davis after the first quarter as he was ruled out for the remainder of the game with a stomach illness.
The Lakers started to cut into their deficit in the second quarter with Russell Westbrook leading the way, first finding Dwight Howard for an alley-oop and then Malik Monk for a layup.
Westbrook and Carmelo Anthony did what they can to carry the load, but without Davis, the Lakers just didn’t have much of a scoring punch on the floor. Luckily, the Trail Blazers went cold from three in the second quarter, allowing L.A. to cut into the deficit and go into the halftime locker room trailing 51-36.
While Westbrook tried to get going offensively in the third quarter knowing the Lakers were missing key offensive pieces, the buckets just weren’t falling for the Lakers point guard.
The Lakers were also getting killed on the offensive glass, which is not a recipe for success when you’re already having trouble scoring on the offensive end of the floor. It took until midway through the third quarter for the Lakers to reach 50 points, falling down by 30 points in a game that was essentially out of reach.
After a couple more Lillard threes, the game was really out of reach as the Lakers trailed 93-62 through three quarters.
The Lakers’ two-way players, Sekou Doumbouya and Jay Huff, saw their first NBA action of the season and actually played pretty well. It came in garbage time though, with the Lakers eventually falling.
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