Blazers 105, Knicks 90: "Remember how fun that first quarter was? Sigh."

Well hey, this one started fun, like LeopardSuit said in the thread. For a good 15 to 20 minutes, the short-handed Knicks hummed along wonderfully. Some pretty wacky lineups moved the ball quite well and pierced Portland's awful pick-and-roll defense for heaps of easy buckets. Kenyon Martin and Marcus Camby were dominating around the rim, Kurt Thomas was nearly on pace for a triple-double, Chris Copeland was cookin' soup as a starter, and life was good.

All of the above stoked a double-digit lead that carried through much of the second. None of the above was even remotely sustainable. The Blazers suddenly started to defend the pick-and-roll late in the second and spat out a rapid 13-0 run to take the halftime lead. Damian Lillard and friends took over from there against crumbling New York rotations while the Knicks farted away one offensive possession after another. J.R. Smith did his darnedest to shoot the Knicks back into it during the fourth-- and New York did cut the deficit to four-- but that luck ran out as well.

Meanwhile, Raymond Felton shot just 4-12 in front of a snarling Portland crowd. He wasn't just bad, but quiet, too. Supremely disappointing.

Oh, and Kenyon Martin contused his shin according to Al Trautwig, because it's no longer enough for the Knicks to just lose. They have to get hurt, too. Hopefully that's nothing serious or long-term, because the Knicks just don't have any players left.

So, despite some early promise, things went pretty much as expected without Amar'e Stoudemire, Carmelo Anthony, and Tyson Chandler. If you lie down with a starting line up of Felton, Shumpert, Copeland, Martin, and Thomas, you get up with your third straight blowout loss. There have been better road trips.