Blazers’ historic playoff choke jobs vs. Spurs can’t be good for Tiago Splitter’s job security

On Sunday afternoon, the Portland Trail Blazers fell behind 3-1 in their first round playoff series against the San Antonio Spurs with a tough 114-93 loss at home. Amazingly, the Blazers actually led this game by 19 points at one point in the contest, but they quickly fell apart from there, with the Spurs engineering a 40-point turnaround to take full control of the series.

After the game, head coach Tiago Splitter spoke on what he felt went wrong for his team in the brutal loss.

“I think the guys fought hard,” he said, per Michael C. Wright of ESPN. “Second half, I thought we mentally kind of like break down, couldn’t get over the fact that we were up and then they just came back to the game. Didn’t shoot the ball well, turned over the ball, live turnovers, getting into transition, dunks, threes.”

Indeed, the Blazers seemed to lose focus as the game wore on, which was a mirror image of what happened in Game 3 of the series, in which Portland went up by 15 points and slowly watched the lead wither away en route to a loss. In fact, the Blazers are just the third team in the last 20 postseasons to lose consecutive home playoff games in which they led by 15 points or more, a mark most recently achieved by last year’s Boston Celtics.

With owner Tom Dundon reportedly willing to pull out all the stops in order to cut costs when searching for a new head coach, it’s certainly worth wondering whether Splitter, who was promoted to this role after the arrest of Chauncey Billups, might see his job security in doubt moving forward.

In any case, Game 5 of this series is set for Tuesday evening back in San Antonio.

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