No offense: Blazers lost fifth straight

Przybilla lost for season

By Kerry Eggers

LocalNewsDaily.com, Apr 6, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Things were not pretty for the Trail Blazers Sunday at the Rose Garden.

Portland had season lows for points and field-goal percentage (.342) in a 72-65 loss to the San Antonio Spurs.

To add injury to insult, the Blazers lost center Joel Przybilla for the rest of the season with a broken right hand.

“There wasn’t much good that happened to us (Sunday),” Portland guard Brandon Roy conceded after Portland (38-39) suffered its fifth straight loss and went below .500 for the first time since mid-December.

San Antonio (53-24) got 27 points and 11 rebounds from Tim Duncan as it stayed in contention to finish with the top record in the Western Conference.

The Spurs, coming off an embarrassing 90-64 defeat at Utah Friday night, didn’t have much offensive punch Sunday, either, shooting .389 from the field and finishing with their second-lowest scoring total all year.

Seventy-two points rarely wins an NBA game, but it was enough Sunday.

“A win is never ugly,” San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich said. “We played a really good defensive game. That allowed us an opportunity to get it done. Neither team was very good offensively, but defense got it done for us.”

Besides Duncan, the defending-champion Spurs managed only 45 points between them. Manu Ginobili scored only 10 points and Tony Parker had eight points and seven assists on a night when he made only 4 of 16 shots from the field.

But the Blazers were even more offense-challenged. Roy scored 18 points after a slow start, but got little help from his teammates.

The Spurs “did good things to take us out of what we wanted to do (on offense),” said Roy, who had missed the previous four games with a strained groin muscle. “We had some costly turnovers, we took some bad shots and they just did a good job. We have to give them credit.”

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