Since I’ve already come up a fair number of witty allusions to roses, and there’s plenty of pictures of the Portland Trailblazers’ dancers on the Internet we’ll have a second play in tonight’s Portland Trailblazers/Sacramento Kings basketball game.  We had a play on the side earlier and this one is on the total.  This picture is of one of the Portland Trailblazers’ dancers.  In other news, Portland, Oregon has more strip clubs per capita than any city in the US.  Coincidence?  You tell me…:

SACRAMENTO KINGS VS. PORTLAND TRAILBLAZERS

In our side play we talked about the difficulty the Blazers have had adjusting to life without Greg Oden.  Before Oden’s injury (which we’ll refer to as ‘Before Oden’ or ‘B.O.’) the Blazers had become more of a halfcourt team to better leverage his growing impact on the defensive end.  After Oden’s injury (‘After Oden’ or ‘A.O.’) they’ve quickly reverted to being an uptempo team to take advantage of their backcourt talent and depth.  This isn’t a transition that happens overnight, but after one game where they struggled with the change in style they’ve done fairly well with it at least in terms of point output.

Helping matters here is a Sacramento defense that ranks near the bottom of the NBA in scoring defense (26) allowing over 105 PPG against.  ’B.O’ that wouldn’t have necessarily had us looking ‘over’ here as the Blazers would have controlled the tempo and made it a halfcourt game.  ’A.O’, they’ll want to run with Sacramento and push the pace.  The last three teams to do that against Sacto dropped 115+ on the Kings.

Portland has gone ‘over’ in three straight and six of eight, while Sacramento has gone ‘over’ in three of four.  Look for a tempo and a final score similar to San Antonio’s 118-106 beatdown of the Kings last week and consider that Portland has more offensive weapons.  Blazers should win and cover easily, with the final score going well ‘over’ the total.

PLAY PORTLAND/SACRAMENTO OVER 201