Trail Blazers at Pistons
The Portland Trail Blazers won the first three stops of a six-game road trip but have hit a bit of a snag of late. The Trail Blazers will try to end a two-game slide and finish the trip with a winning record when they visit the Detroit Pistons on Sunday.
Portland was one of the hottest teams in the NBA with wins in 14 of 16 games before suffering a 116-93 loss at Boston on Wednesday and coming up just short in a 117-115 setback at Toronto on Friday. The back-to-back losses put a momentary snag in the Trail Blazers’ plans to overtake Dallas for the No. 6 spot in the Western Conference, and they will enter play on Sunday just a half-game back of the Mavericks. The Pistons are in a much more precarious position as the No. 9 team in the East and have also cooled off with back-to-back losses, following a four-game winning streak. A 102-89 loss to the struggling New York Knicks on Saturday dropped Detroit out of the top eight, a half-game behind the Chicago Bulls.
TV: 6 p.m. ET, NBA-TV, CSN Northwest (Portland), FSN Detroit Plus
ABOUT THE TRAIL BLAZERS (33-30): Damian Lillard joined Golden State star Stephen Curry as the only two players in the league with multiple 50-point performances this season when he went off for 50 at Toronto. Lillard has scored at least 30 points in nine of the last 11 games to spark Portland’s surge up the standings and was happy about how his team responded even in a loss on Friday. “I was proud of the way we bounced back from the Boston game and competed,” Lillard told reporters. “Even (Friday) we ended up getting in a little bit of a hole in the second half but we still fought back and I think, with some of the slippage that we had, we should be proud of the way that we still gave ourselves a chance down the stretch.”
ABOUT THE PISTONS (31-31): Detroit looked like it had turned the corner with the four-game winning streak that included wins over Cleveland and Toronto, but the last two games have exposed some familiar cracks. The Pistons shot 39.1 percent from the floor on Saturday while allowing the 26-38 Knicks to go off at 53.2 percent, and coach Stan Van Gundy was honest in his assessment of the performance. “We should all be disappointed, it was ridiculous,” Van Gundy told reporters. “We were just terrible. We didn’t bring any energy to the game. We didn’t play well at either end. It was an embarrassing performance.”
BUZZER BEATERS
1. Trail Blazers G C.J. McCollum is 9-of-13 from 3-point range in the last three games.
2. Pistons G Reggie Jackson is 7-of-30 from the field in the last two games, including 0-of-8 from 3-point range.
3. Detroit snapped a five-game losing streak in the series with a 120-103 win in Portland on Nov. 8.