The Los Angeles Lakers will face Portland in the first round of the NBA playoffs, thanks to the Trail Blazers 126-122 victory over the Memphis Grizzlies in the Western Conference Play-In Saturday.
The best-of-seven series will begin Tuesday. The Lakers were 2-1 against Portland in the regular season.
Memphis entered the fourth quarter with a 94-89 lead. The Grizzlies lead grew to 101-93 on Gorgui Dieng’s tip-in with nine minutes, 55 seconds to play.
The Trail Blazers cut the lead to one three times, then tied the score, 111-111, with 3:08 left on CJ McCollum’s 3-point basket. Portland took its first lead since midway through the third quarter on Jusuf Nurkic’s 3-point play with 2:39 remaining and never trailed again.
The Trail Blazers led 30-14 with 1:55 left in the first quarter, 31-19 at the end of the first quarter and 58-52 at halftime.
Damian Lillard scored 31 points for Portland while McCollum added 29. Memphis point guard Ja Morant led all scorers with 35.
If the Grizzlies had won Saturday, they would have played the Trail Blazers again Sunday for the right to face the Lakers.
As part of the plan to restart the season, the NBA decided that if the team with a conference’s eighth-best winning percentage was four or fewer games ahead of the team with the ninth-best winning percentage, the teams would play a play-in tournament to decide the eighth seed in the conference.
“Without a full 82-game season, we wanted to create an opportunity for the ninth seed to have an opportunity as long as it was within four games,” Tim Frank, the NBA’s senior vice president, league operations communications, told City News Service.
If the team with the eighth-best record won the first game of the play-in tournament, it would advance to the playoffs, while the team with the ninth-best record would have to defeat the team with the eighth-best record twice.
Lillard was unanimously selected as the NBA Player of the Seeding Games in voting by sportswriters and broadcasters who were on site covering the 2019-20 season restart at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.
Lillard averaged a league-high 37.6 points and 9.6 assists in the seeding games, including 61- and 51-point performances as well as a 45-point, 12-assist game, helping lead Portland to a 6-2 record.
Memphis led the Trail Blazers by 3 1/2 games in the race for the eighth seed in the Western Conference entering the season restart. The Grizzlies were 2-6 in the seeding games, including a 140-135 overtime loss to Portland July 31, finishing a half-game behind the 35-39 Trail Blazers in the race for eighth.
Starting forward Jaren Jackson Jr. missed Memphis’ final five seeding games and the play-in game because of a torn meniscus in his left knee when he made an unstable landing after making contact with an opposing player while contesting a shot in the 109-99 loss the New Orleans Pelicans on Aug. 3, the Grizzlies’ third seeding game.
Memphis was 2-3 in its final five seeding games without Jackson, its second-leading scorer, averaging 17.4 points per game.
The entire NBA postseason will be played at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Lake Buena Vista, Florida without spectators due to the coronavirus pandemic.