Sergio Rodriguez played the best game I’ve seen him play yet. It didn’t show up in the box score like some of his more heralded games but he nabbed 3 steals and became the only guy besides Brandon to be able to get past anybody defensively. He broke down the Kings and dished for 4 assists, bringing a critical spark to the offense. Best of all you didn’t notice him standing out other than appropriately on his incisive trips into the lane. He didn’t break the offense to get his moves in, he made the offense with his moves.

Sergio, and the rest of the bench players for that matter, are often at their best when they’re not that noticeable. The bench should be a solid unit that does its job as expected. They should be a spark, not an out-of-control forest fire.

Your humor in the write-up is the only worthwhile thing from this game. I was there tonight and when the final horn sounded, there was strangely nothing to cheer for, except what felt like a hollow victory. I’m thinking perhaps we’ve been spoiled with the first 4 home games all being very exciting on their own merits, so this one was just . . . ugh.

ps: what in the world happened on that Sergio pass to Rudy under the basket to end the quarter? They didn’t show a replay on the big screen, and I had a bad angle to see, but boy, that looked like a solid pass to a player in the perfect position and then . . . out of bounds, King’s ball.

Even on my small grainy computer monitor.

LaMarcus sure smirks a lot after he makes mistakes. He reminds me of Rasheed Wallace without the passion, which sort of sounds like Joe Smith. OK, calm down. It’s only his third year and he’s still a million times better than Tyrus Thomas.

Is Sergio playing better defense, or is Blake just getting worse? A little of both perhaps?

The Garden was loud at the end of the game tonight. I hope I get my voice back before Wednesday.
I love being the 6th man G-O Blazers!
Thanks for the recap Dave.

I don’t see the toughness or the aggressiveness necessary to succeed in the playoffs. He has no balance on his shots, has poor defensive rebounding, gets too rattled easily by physical defense, and can’t get to the free throw line. He has playoff failure written all over. He better spend some time working on his J because if that’s all he’s going to do, then he better shoot like KG.

DO NOT TRADE SERGIO. Sergio is only player, other than Roy, capable of dribble penetration in the rotation. He makes the 2nd unit go and creates open shots off his dribble. I have doubts about his outside shooting, but there is no question to his importance to this team.

KP has to take a hard look at this team and make some moves for dribblers. There is Roy and Sergio, then a bunch of spot up shooters.

Przybilla, why did you chuck that full court shot tonight? Or else you would be 15-15 on FGs the last 4 games. You are my favorite center in the league.

as we’ve seen in other games, late in this game sacto decided to pull a big to pressure roy to get the ball out of his hands. with a slow body coming at him, i have a hard time believing roy couldn’t just cut around the double and then see if there are better options than just predictably tossing the pass to the next closest man.

right now that pass either goes sideline or to the top of the 3, and the blazers don’t really seem to capitalize on the out of position player.

i mean, i know he should probably pass out of the double. i guess it’s nate that needs to get the rest of the guys ready to exploit the mismatches that come from the double. but right now it feels like we’d have more success with roy splitting or going around the double than unloading and counting on the rest of the team to take advantage of the 4 on 3. i guess i have that much confidence that roy can break the double and then make he pass directly to the open player or take it to the hole instead of passing to the nearest covered player by default and letting the defense readjust.

The good news is the blazers were able to put a run together and pull this one out. I guess that says something. Thanks BRoy.

But at least we got that W.

I think along with Roy, Joel picked up the majority of the slack and anchored the team when it was necessary down the strech. The shooting was amazingly bad tonight and when that happens you have to rely on the intangables players bring, and the big one that was necessary tonight was rebounding. Thanks Joel!

I also just need to put in a word about Sergio’s passes in the lane… butter. Silky sweet butter.

I know you don’t like plus/minus, but I think its time to discuss it with respect to Oden and Joel. We’ve now had 5 consecutive games where the team has played MUCH better with Joel than with Greg. Its only partly Greg’s fault, but Its something that is worthy of discussion and I’d like to see your thoughts on it. I think its a significant concern, as big a concern (or bigger) as LMA’s horrible shooting.

We’ve had way more than usual the last 5 games or so. Has to stop.

The last 30 seconds were horribul to watch. First Blake doesn’t find somebody to throw the ball to and has to take the last timeout. Then neither Roy nor Rudy manage to get really open, and Travis takes his head down before going for a contested fallaway jumper. Ugh. That one point win was more lucky then the one against San Antonio when Finley missed the last shot. It’s a great sign for our playoff hopes that we won these games and are undefeated on home court, but there is quite some work left to do to make this team really dangerous for the rest of the league.

Besides LMA the guy who seems to struggle a lot right now (especially late in games) is Rudy. He gets more attention by the defense like Dave mentioned. Individually he almost disappears in the fourth quarters, and even open shots don’t fall anymore. He still has good ideas to change things up like the pass inside to Channing, but somehow the execution doesn’t work well (just shot it over his head). Maybe he has problems adapting to different lineups, since Nate throws him in with almost every combination imaginable. I hope the units will be consolidated again once Martell returns.

Thought I’d just remind some folks of that minor little fact.

Seriously, what is wrong with some of you people? A bad game and people are calling for LaMarcus’ head, saying Oden will never be a force and implying that Nate still sucks as a coach by trying to force Oden into the starting 5.

All I care about is the win and I love close games. I’d rather have the ball in the Blazer’s hands with 10 seconds left and a 1 point lead, but sometimes you have to rely on your defense.

I’ve been a lurker for awhile now and finally joined. I have a few observations I’d like to share.

1. Rudy- I think Rudy may be a little tired and that’s why he’s disapeared in the last few games. We just came off a stretch of 5 games in 7 days in 5 different cities and he’s use to playing in what? 2 or 3 in that amount of time. Plus the competition is a whole lot tougher. He’s not as crisp as he was a few games ago. Teams may have ajusted to him but after watching him in the gold medal game I don’t think that’s the whole story.

2. Oden- People need to cut him some slack. He just came off of a surgery that takes about 2 years to recover from fully. The others that went through this also had the benefit of having played NBA ball before the surgery and knew what it was all about. Greg’s learning a new level of the game without all the tools he’s accustum to having and that’s gotta be tough. We probably won’t see the real Oden until next year.

3. The team as a whole needs time to pactice together so they can truely intagrate the things they’re trying to learn on the fly. Once our schedule slows down a bit and we have some time at our facilities. We’ll start playing smarter, faster, stronger and smoother.

Just my thoughts. Hope I’m not out to lunch! lol