Series Tied 1-1 Heading Back To Portland After Contentious Game 2 - Trailblazers.com

DENVER -- While they would have much preferred a sweep, the Trail Blazers will have to settle for taking home-court advantage back to Portland.

After winning Game 1 on Saturday, the Trail Blazers were outplayed in all four quarters in Game 2 to come away with a 128-109 loss to the Denver Nuggets in front of a crowd of 7,727 Monday night at Ball Arena.

“The reality is they were the more aggressive team,” said Trail Blazers head coach Terry Stotts. “Their starters were more aggressive, their bench was more aggressive. (Denver) played much better than they did in Game 1 and they deserved to win the game. So we can point to a lot of different things but they outplayed us top to bottom.”

The series is now tied at 1-1 with the series shifting to Moda Center -- the team was approved on Monday to increase capacity to 8,000 fans -- for the next two games.

“When our fans are in the building and that building is noisy and our fans are into it, we’ve got one of the hardest buildings to win in,” said Damian Lillard. “It’s the playoffs, so we gonna need that. I would love to see our building have the same amount of fans that a lot of these other teams we’re watching have, because you can tell they’re feeding off of it. And with us having the best fans, of course it would be to our advantage.”

With Portland wrestling away home-court by winning Game 1, Monday’s game was all but a must-win for Denver, and they looked as though they approached it that way early on. They played with more urgency, were much more physical and forced six turnovers to go up by as many as 13 points in the first quarter. Were it not for the shooting of Damian Lillard -- something you could say for basically the entirety of the game -- Portland would have trailed by much more than six going into the second.

But it only got worse thereafter. After getting solid production only from Nikola Jokic in Game 1, the Nuggets had contributions that came from up and down the roster in Game 2, and especially in the second quarter. Jokic, Michael Porter Jr., and Paul Millsap each scored 11 points on combined 8-of-10 shooting while the team as a whole shot 74 percent in the quarter.

And again, had Lillard not had another one of his ridiculous shooting stretches -- he scored 22 of Portland’s 36 points in the quarter on 6-of-8 shooting from three -- the Trail Blazers were have likely been out of the game by the half rather than trailing 73-61.

After chippy first half, the game would default to a foul fest in the second half. The officials called 18 personal fouls, two technicals and a flagrant in the third quarter alone, ruining any chance for either team to build any rhythm or momentum, which benefited the team that already had a lead.

Portland never managed to get the game down to single digits in the fourth, and would eventually send the deep bench into the game with a little under four minutes remaining in the game. All that was left at that point was to starting looking ahead to Game 3.

“I think it’s just a perfect example of you can fill it up but when you trade baskets with a good team like them, especially on the road and with their backs against the wall,” said Lillard. “You’re probably not going to win that. So even though we had it going offensively, we didn’t get enough stops so they were scoring the ball, too... I thought we competed, we played hard, we just didn’t play well enough for long enough periods of time.”

Lillard finished with 42 points on 11-of-24 shooting from the field, 9-of-16 from three and 11-of-13 from the line, 10 assists, four rebounds and a block in 42 minutes.

CJ McCollum went 9-of-12 for 21 points and six rebounds. Norman Powell added 15 points and two blocks. Jusuf Nurkic fouled out with seven points and 13 rebounds in 25 minutes.

Nikola Jokic went for 38 points, eight rebounds and five assists in 31 minutes. Michael Porter Jr. had 18, Paul Millsap added 15 points and seven rebounds off the bench.

Next up, the series shifts to Portland for Game 3 Thursday night at the Moda Center. Tipoff is scheduled for 7:30 p.m.

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