The Portland Trail Blazers took a five-point lead into the fourth quarter but could not hold off a hard-charging Houston squad in a 106-99 road loss Friday night.<\/p>\n
The Rockets reeled off 15 straight points to retake the lead, building a double-digit margin as the clock ticked under four minutes to play.<\/p>\n
Portland made one final run when Robert Williams III scored a second-chance bucket, and Matisse Thybulle hit a 3-pointer. Jerami Grant swiped a steal, and got loose on a 2-on-1 fastbreak, but Blazers turnovers prevented Portland from making it a one-possession game.<\/p>\n
The Blazers fizzled down the stretch, shooting only 7-for-21 (33.3%) in the fourth quarter, and going 1-for-8 (12.5%) from 3-point range.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe fought hard and were there in the end, but at the end of the day you have to make shots,\u201d Blazers\u2019 coach Tiago Splitter said.<\/p>\n
Grant led the Blazers with 21 points, while Jrue Holiday added 20.<\/p>\n
Portland (30-34) returns home to face Indiana at 6 p.m. Sunday at the Moda Center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Portland Trail Blazers took a five-point lead into the fourth quarter but could not hold off a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":194410,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":{"0":"post-194409","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-houston","9":"tag-houston-headlines","10":"tag-houston-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}