Daily Vanguard

December 18th, 2007

Streaking to ocho

Paul Allen strode down the halls of the Rose Garden like he owned the place again, triumphantly waving eight fingers after the Trail Blazers (13-12) stretched their win streak to eight games with an 88-76 win over the New Orleans Hornets.

Playing the second game of a back-to-back, Portland started sluggish and mustered just 37 points by halftime. The team was hampered by a cold night on the offensive end, finishing 41 percent for the game.

But the fact that the Blazers’ shots were clanking off the rim didn’t matter because Portland used a huge fourth quarter to bury the Hornets. Brandon Roy, fresh off being named the Western Conference Player of the Week for the second-straight week, dominated again.

Roy hit a three to stretch the lead to 71-66 with 8:41 left to play, and the score got no closer as the Rose Garden crowd witnessed the Blazers’ longest win streak since the 2002-03 season.

“I was trying to pace myself,” Roy said. “We won a big game last night (in Denver). We’re playing great team basketball right now. This was a team and organizational win for us tonight.”

Roy was about the only player who had it going against New Orleans. Travis Outlaw finished with eight points on 1-12 shooting, suffering his worst night of the streak. Martell Webster had 13 points, including a powerful fast-break dunk, and Steve Blake added 10 points on 4-5 shooting.

Veteran big man Raef LaFrentz played 11 minutes, collecting 11 rebounds while blocking three shots. Channing Frye came alive late but was limited to 15 minutes due to foul trouble as he tried to contain David West and Tyson Chandler.

Chandler noted how difficult the Rose Garden has become to play in after the loss.

“They’re playing great at home,” Chandler said. “They definitely have home-court advantage because you can’t hear anything out there. I wasn’t expecting an easy game tonight.”

Neither was Blazers head coach Nate McMillan, who said the team had been preparing for this game for “a while now.”

“Tonight when we didn’t shoot the ball well what we saw was a young team having to lift each other,” McMillan said. “All I told them before the game was we can guarantee ourselves a winning month tonight. We didn’t talk about the record or the streak.”

Even so, the Blazers would do well to look at their record. Portland is just 1.5 games behind division-leading Denver (14-10), and the Nuggets come to town Friday.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 4:39 am and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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