The Official Site of Brandon Roy

Tue, Mar 2nd 2010, 09:37

Brandon's big 2nd half helps Blazers finish roadtrip 4-1

Halftime in the Trail Blazers locker room Monday wasn’t a place for the easily offended, or weak minded.

With one of the more important games of the season half over, the Blazers it seemed, had never arrived to play the Memphis Grizzlies.

Brandon Roy was missing layups and throwing balls into the stands. Marcus Camby was forcing passes into the lane. Nobody had a shooting groove and the defense left the lane as open as a runway. Memphis led 53-41.

So when coach Nate McMillan walked in to address the troops, you could have lit a match with his words.

“He started to scream real bad,” a wide-eyed Nicolas Batum said.

The essence of McMillan’s tirade?

“Wake up!” Batum said. “He told us to wake up.”

The Blazers did that and more in the third quarter, scoring a near-record 41 points, then holding on for a closer-than-it-sounds 103-93 victory at Memphis.

“There were some choice words,” McMillan said, unwilling to give details. “And they responded.”

It was the first game of March, an unofficial kick start to the playoff races, and the Blazers showed they just might make the stretch run as dramatic and hell-bent as their season, playing brilliantly at times and maddeningly at others.

In the end, the Blazers were able to close their trip with a 4-1 record behind a sterling second-half from Brandon Roy (19 of his 25 points after halftime), another big offensive display from Batum (21 points, four three-pointers) and some push-the-pace passes from Andre Miller (11 assists, two turnovers). It didn’t hurt, either, that the Blazers made all 19 of their free throw attempts.

“We knew this was an important game in the standings, you know, Memphis has had our number this year, and I thought our guys came out in that second half and took this game,” McMillan said.

The Blazers (36-27) earned a series split with Memphis (30-30) and moved four games ahead of New Orleans and Houston for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference with 19 games remaining. Memphis lost its seventh consecutive home game and dropped 4 1/2 games behind Portland.

As important as the victory was, and as stunning of a turnaround it was in the third quarter, the finish was just as harried and stressful.

In other words, it was typical Blazers basketball.

The Blazers had a 13-point lead with just under 10 minutes left, but Memphis got to within 93-92 with 2:19 left when Zach Randolph scored on a three-point play. It was January all over again, when Memphis came into the Rose Garden and stunned the Blazers with a 13-1 run to close the game in a 109-105 kick-to-the-gut victory.

But this time, it was the Blazers with the emphatic closeout, finishing the game on a 10-1 run.

Newcomer Marcus Camby made two huge plays — a tip-in with 1:25 left and a smartly called timeout after he dived and recovered a loose ball — and Batum was all over the place in the final two minutes, earning a new nickname from Roy in the process: “Go-Go-Gadget.”

Continue reading recap….