Trail Blazers continue process in defeat, and now in victory

9:13 AM ET

PORTLAND — Terry Stotts couldn’t remember whether it was Al McGuire or Rick Majerus who said it, but it was an aphorism he’d returned to several times since the Portland Trail Blazers dropped two games in Los Angeles:

What you accept in victory, you must accept in defeat.

The author of the statement is actually Don Meyer, who won 923 games as a college coach at small schools in the Midwest. Regardless of the sentiment’s origin, it repeated by Damian Lillard, C.J. McCollum and several other supporting cast members of the Trail Blazers over the past week. Across the country, Charlotte Hornets coach Steve Clifford delivered the closest thing there is to a definitive manifesto on the premise after his team got waxed in Miami on Wednesday.

A basketball team can control only the process — the schemes, the decision-making, the hustle. If a possession yields a wide-open shot for the right guy at the right spot, the offense has performed its job. If the defense denies such a shot to the opponent, it too has performed its job. In the NBA, where assassins drain unconscionable shots against snarling defenses, outcomes are unmanageable. You accept them, even in defeat.

So when, just before halftime on Saturday, Trail Blazers forward Al-Farouq Aminu drained a 3-pointer under duress, Stotts flashed a big, toothy ironic smile. Aminu had missed open 3 after open 3 over the first nine quarters of the series, and yet this one — contested, off-balanced, with the shot clock expiring — drops. Basketball is a silly game with silly outcomes, process be damned.

Outcome shined on Portland in Game 3, as they knocked off the Clippers 96-88. The Trail Blazers will try to knot the series at 2-2 on Monday night in Game 4 at the Moda Center.

Lillard played the process-result anthem after the game, saying Saturday’s win was a game not unlike the first two … except for the shotmaking: “I think after the first two games, I said we competed hard and we had a chance, but we didn’t shoot the ball well, so the score didn’t really say how the game went. Tonight we played the same game. Obviously the energy was up. We just had more of an alertness to us and …

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