HailBlazers
RipCity
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2008
- Messages
- 20,208
- Likes
- 17,661
- Points
- 113
Respect!
[video=youtube;NCZ76gmNJaY]
By Ben Golliver
Aldridge scored a season-high 38 points against the Thunder, hitting 17-of-28 field goals, and he added 13 rebounds, five assists and two steals. He scored in so many different ways that it took Lillard a full paragraph to list them all, and his third quarter bombardment -- 16 points on 8-for-9 shooting -- stood as one of the most commanding stretches of his career. The Moda Center rewarded him with "MVP" chants as he stepped to the free throw line in the game's closing sequence, and he said afterwards that he savored this collective sign of respect.
"Just surreal," Aldridge said of the chanting. "It was humbling, you know, to have that moment here."
He could have stopped there but he didn't, and what came next called back to all of the appreciation episodes listed above.
"I've been here so long and I've had very few of those types of chants here," Aldridge said. "That was fun. I thought that made the night complete for me."
[video=youtube;NCZ76gmNJaY]
"That's [Aldridge] taking over," Lillard told Blazersedge. "We give him the ball on the block and he do what he does, and that's score the ball. Going to the middle, to his running jump hook, fading away baseline, he did it all. He got offensive rebounds, he competed in the paint. It was some dirty work being done. He got some lay-ups off offensive rebounds, his turnaround was going a few times in the middle. That was just him taking over the game."
By Ben Golliver


