With 82 games down and a three-day break before tipping-off versus the Los Angeles Clippers in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs on Sunday, the Portland Trail Blazers took a moment to exhale and look back on the regular season following Wednesday's 107-99 win over the Denver Nuggets at Moda Center.
As it's been referenced over and over again throughout the season, this wasn't supposed to happen. After the departures of four starters and the acquisition of several young role players last summer, the Blazers were supposed to only win 26-35 games and should be departing to various destinations to begin their offseason vacations Thursday morning.
But the doubters drove the Blazers to a 44-38 record that was good enough for the fifth seed in the West, a point that was apparent as the team reflected on the regular season after Wednesday's win.
"When everybody came out with the expectations and all their expertise about what we were going to do this season, I feel like that was the biggest thing that, not only just me, but everybody remembered," said guard Allen Crabbe. "One person picked as what, 15 out of 15 in the West? The list goes on, man. Everybody felt disrespected, and that’s not what our season is gonna be. It was everybody’s goal since training camp that we were gonna play hard and it’s ‘Us against everybody.’ Everybody stuck with that, we got better as the season went along and we had a helluva season."
A veteran journeyman signed as a free agent in the offseason, big man Ed Davis -- along with other newcomers -- felt an opportunity to prove themselves came with this young Trail Blazers squad.
"We’ve got a lot of guys on this team that have been around a little bit, especially me and Chief [Al-Farouq Aminu]," Davis said. "A lot of guys have a lot to prove, teams gave up on and stuff like that, so everybody has something to prove from an individual standpoint. As a team, whenever they have you at the bottom of the pack with the Sixers and the Sacramento Kings… You don’t wanna be associated with those organizations, so that gave us motivation from day one. We’ve been taking it one game at a time, even at our lowest point when we were 11-20, we were still coming in and working -- still positive. Coach [Terry Stotts] was still the same, and that’s why we’re in the situation we’re in today."
For Damian Lillard, the team's unequivocal leader and one of the two longest tenured players on the Blazers' roster, the 2015-16 campaign stands out despite this being his third-straight trip to the postseason.
"This is probably — this is the most special [season]," Lillard said. "The first one, we knew after my rookie year that we was gonna have our stuff together. We had a good team; we had a lot of good players and then after that, we got out of the first round. The next year, we expected to be back in that position and we did. We lost to a tough Memphis team.
"Coming into this year, it was just like they didn’t give us a chance, you know what I mean? The fact that we found our way back to the fifth spot like we had been the first two times I went, it makes it that much more special. Not just for me, but for a lot of the guys in the locker room. People said ‘It’s gonna be me and nobody else.’ A lot of these guys have stepped up huge. I’m just proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish."
The work is not finished, however. The Blazers now prepare for a tough seven-game series with the Clippers, and that was the sole focus of center Mason Plumlee.
"We can’t be happy with exceeding others’ expectations because we had higher expectations from day one," Plumlee put it frankly.
"We knew we were a playoff team, and now we’re ready to do something in the playoffs."