Blazers: The Dark Horse Of The NBA Playoffs

The Portland Trail Blazers are officially the dark horse team of the NBA playoffs.

The Blazers eliminated the Houston Rockets with an ice-cold, buzzer-beating three pointer by Damien Lillard to move on to Round 2. They were the underdogs in that series and most thought that the Rockets would cruise past the Blazers. That did not happen and now the young Trail Blazers squad will be looking to upset another team from Texas in the San Antonio Spurs.

The Spurs reminded everyone just how good they are by completely dismantling the Dallas Mavericks in Game 7 of that first round series.

Now the veteran favorites are set to collide with the scrappy underdogs.

The Trail Blazers have been relying on the offensive ability of Lillard and to a further extent LaMarcus Aldridge. Aldridge put up eye popping scoring stats in the first round of the NBA playoffs and the Rockets defense, which is one of the best in the NBA, by the way, had no answer for the duo.

The Spurs are arguably the best all-around team in the NBA.  They have the best win-loss record during the regular season, not to mention they were one rebound away from a NBA Championship last year.

These two division rivals met four times during the regular season and split games, so that does not tell us much about how this series is likely to play out, except we should perhaps expect a back-and-forth series.

This is going to be a hard series to accurately predict.  The sportsbooks have the Spurs as the –6.5 favorites, but the Rockets also opened as the favorites in their Round 1 series against the Blazers.

After this series is all said and done we are either going to be talking about the age of the Spurs or the inexperience factor of the Blazers.