After the Trail Blazers missed their first two shots and the Lakers turned the ball over, Rajon Rondo opens the scoring on a reverse layup more than a minute into the game.
After the Trail Blazers evened the score, Brandon Ingram scored in the lane off a LeBron James feed for a 4-2 lead.
After another Portland miss, the Lakers open a 6-2 lead with a JaVale McGree dunk with 9:40 left in the first quarter.
The Philadelphia 76ers have routed the Chicago Bulls 127-108 in the first game of a nationally televised doubleheader tonight.
The Lakers and Trail Blazers should be tipping off in a matter of minutes to open their seasons.
Portland coach Terry Stotts said that when the team honors Paul Allen, the owner of the Trail Blazers and Seattle Seahawks who died Monday of cancer, he’ll think about how Allen was an “extraordinary man not only in sports but in the world in general.”
“I’ll probably, when we honor him, just be thinking about the impact on the lives that he’s had around the world beyond basketball,” Stotts said. “It was a phenomenal life and it’s really hard to kind of wrap your mind around it.”
Stotts said at times this week it was hard to focus on his job because his mind wandered back to Allen and what he meant to so many people.
As they prepared to face LeBron James with his new Lakers team in the season opener Thursday night at the Moda Center, the Portland Trail Blazers looked at some film of James last season when he played for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Portland coach Terry Stotts said it was done to “see if we could discern anything from those games.”
When he compared what James did in Cleveland with that he did during the exhibition season with the Lakers, Stotts immediately noticed that James didn’t have to dominate the basketball nearly as much.