All right, welcome on to our first ever NBA Cup night that was exclusively on Amazon Prime,

at least on the national games.

And we got an awesome night of basketball.

West Coast was probably the best.

A lot of interesting stuff to talk about coming up here.

Let's begin, though, with what took place in Portland.

Comeback when Denver blows a second straight game late that they were in control of.

They also did this against Golden State. And, of course, with Nicole Yukic, they've long

been one of the league's best clutch teams. So we'll talk about the end of the game,

of course, but what were some of your main takeaways during this contest? I was very excited

for Blazers nuggets, even beyond the NBA Cup implications just because these teams have

kind of interesting strengths and weaknesses against each other. But one of my big questions was the nuggets are a flawed, but still somewhat capable

defensive team. How was Portland going to generate offense? And one of the big things they

did was both teams got to the free throw line a lot. Each team had 31 free throw attempts in

this game. Denver made more of them than Portland did. And there were a lot

of Blazers who deserve credit for that. I mean, Obdia had some big free throws late. Jeremy Grant,

former Nugget, had some big, bigger ones late. And so I thought that for Portland, like, it was

that core question. You know, they make life hard. They already beat the Warriors in Portland this

year. So they make life hard on good teams.

But could they score enough because we know they can defend?

And I think broadly speaking, this wasn't like a tour to force offensively, but I thought they were good enough to win.

Yeah, the Blazers are a team that assaults the rim.

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