Blazers' Huge Back-To-Back Moved To National Television
Trail Blazers fans won't be the only ones closely watching their team's tough finish to the regular season. A nationwide audience, it turns out, will be joining them.
The league announced on Monday that Portland's back-to-back road games against the Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz this week have been flexed to national television, a nod to their potential importance in the tightly-packed Western Conference standings.
The Blazers' game against Utah on Wednesday will now be televised on ESPN and tipoff at 6:30 p.m. (PST). The second half of their back-to-back versus Phoenix has been moved to TNT, but maintains its 7:00 p.m. start time. Both games will also be broadcast locally on NBC Sports Northwest.
Portland enters Monday night's game against the lowly Houston Rockets at 39-29, sixth place in the Western Conference. Winners of seven of their last eight games, the Blazers are one game ahead of the Los Angeles Lakers and one game back of the Dallas Mavericks in the standings, holding head-to-head tie-breakers over both teams.
The Lakers' win over the Suns on Sunday kept their realistic hopes of usurping the Blazers alive. If Los Angeles goes 4-0 over a comparatively easy remaining schedule and Portland splits its last four games, the defending champions will vault to sixth, pushing the Blazers back into the play-in tournament.
Portland's chances of making up a single game on Dallas and earning the fifth seed are slightly more likely by virtue of Terry Stotts' team owning the tie-breaker. But like the Lakers, the Mavericks' final quartet of games comes against worse competition than the Blazers' – at least on paper.
The Jazz and Suns, alone at the top of the conference with two games separating them, could each choose to rest core players versus Portland – especially if Utah beats the Golden State Warriors on Monday night and Phoenix loses to them 24 hours later. Donovan Mitchell, still recovering from a nasty ankle sprain, will be out for the Jazz regardless.
The Blazers obviously wouldn't mind if Utah and Phoenix, resigned to finishing first and second in the standings, prioritized rest over performance later this week by sitting their stars. The league office and television partners at ESPN and TNT, though, would be sorely disappointed.