Charlotte's Web of Weirdness

Nic Batum returns to Portland, and some other stuff that happened this weekend.

[Note: The Portland Trail Blazers, by dint of a close victory over the Minnesota Timberwolves on Sunday night, are currently in possession of a five-game winning streak, an unthinkable occurrence not two months previous. Here is a recap of one of those games, a healthy victory over the Charlotte Hornets on Friday night.]

When I (or anyone) sit down to write a game story, I (or anyone) like to find something, some cosmic coincidence, some tag of skin that you can grab and yank on. Sometimes these are called "narratives." No one is totally sure if these are good things or bad things. On one hand, the world is chaotic and disorderly, and assigning meaning to things that happen is a precarious business, overflowing with omission of wider truths. On the other hand, chaos is really very hard for your audience to read, and subjecting them to the full force of that chaos is not a terribly efficient way of acquiring eyeballs.

So you can imagine how happy I was before the game when I thought about the tons and tons of possible threads I could pull on. Nic Batum, returning to a Rip City in the throes of a wave of heavy rain. Damian Lillard, snubbed by the coaches, out to destroy those coaches by wrecking the sad-ass Hornets. Would Noah Vonleh, starting to emerge from the primordial ooze of potential, show out to teach the Hornets a lesson about trading him? Michael Kidd-Gilchrist was returning from a months long injury. Hell, I'm 95 percent sure Spencer Hawes' family was sitting in the box behind me. "Maybe he'll play good, to impress them!" I thought. That could be a good angle, I thought.

Instead, literally none of that happened. Batum was straight up bad—three points (dog fart). Lillard was average, scoring 22 points on 19 shots, (dog bark). Vonleh was OK but not quite a "Can't Believe U Left This" level of OK (dog wag). Kidd-Gilchrist was good, but the sun wasn't rising behind him, showing the Hornets to the Promised Land or any shit like that. Hawes didn't even show out for his family. They (probably) came 180 miles. The game was thoroughly untouched by outside forces.

Instead, a bunch of narratively unimportant dudes showed out. Aminu notched an abnormal 17 point performance. Allen Crabbe scored 20. Brian Roberts, a minimalistic pick-and-roll guard who has killed the Blazers before, played well enough that Kemba Walker got sidelined at the end of the game. Marvin Williams, the boring man's larger Joe Johnson, drilled four three pointers and scored 20 points.

Unnerved, light disorder. The first half was a back-and-forth that felt like it was guided by no particular principles, trading leads for no particular rhyme or reason. The three-point lines were being shadily covered. The Hornets bench built a small lead in the first, then lost it on their next shift, in the second. Lillard dunked near Tyler Hansbrough, but not properly on him. Lillard started on Batum and look very strange guarding his old teammate on the block. There was a wedgie. The Jamba Juice shooter was from Vancouver. Nothing was quite right.

Some of this unnerved energy came straight from the Hornets, who are weird as shit. The team, as they currently operate, is like if someone put a roster together with like a very cursory idea of what "small ball" is, like they knew that some of the players were smaller, but not that they had to have skills that smaller players usually have. And they also start Batum at shooting guard, like some sort of capitulation to the past, a nervous tic from a previous life, a ghost in their body screaming out: "BUT AT LEAST THE TWO GUARD IS BIGGER THAN AVERAGE! RIGHT!? RIGHT!?"

You guys know PJ Hairston is on their team? Watching that guy is like watching an unmotivated Tony Allen. This whole half was weird. Don't go back and watch it.

The game rounded into something more rational in the second half. A Lillard three-pointer off Leonard-Lillard Two-Man-Game* with 2:26 remaining in the quarter gave the Blazers their largest lead, the crowd got all screamy and cheery. Crabbe got fouled on a three pointer, the Blazers build the lead to 20—game pretty much over. The Hornets, behind Roberts, staged a small late comeback that kept fans in their seats for most of the fourth. I thought it was a very classy move by the Hornets, to make sure the fans got their money's worth.

STRAY NOTES:

  • Batum, who has been very nice about returning to Portland, received a warm welcome from the crowd. It was nice, I thought, because his inconsistent style wasn’t always 100 percent appreciated all the time when he actually played here.
  • The national anthem was played by a trio: two fellas with acoustic guitars and one long haired fella in a black collared shirt with two little patterns on the chest and blue jeans who played the violin. Sort of a poppish folky thing—you know the vibe. It was pretty good: On the video screen, Kaman looked like he was really grooving. Would have been better suited for a Blazer game at the Wonder Ballroom, a smaller, more intimate space.
  • I think, in the third quarter, I saw Meyers use the net for leverage to pull himself up and goaltend a practice shot. Efficient use of present resources. Should be admired.
  • THE GREATEST FUN FACT OF ALL TIME: This was the Blazers’ 23rd game, and Michael Jordan owns the Hornets. There are no coincidences for whichever team happens to play the Hornets in their 23rd game.

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