Portland Trailblazers @ LA Lakers 12/28/12 10:30 PM ET

[DEEP3CL]

Nice win last night, seeing some things that are coming into play. For one Mike.D's rotations are solid......something that was a major flaw for Brown. Morris is starting to get confident that he can play at the NBA level, plus in an interview I heard Mike.D said that he'll continue to develop him that's good to hear.

Secondly Mike better not bench Jordan Hill ever again, J-Hill is getting his confidence back and his play clearly displays it. He's our only energy guy who actually goes after rebounds, plain and simple he must play.

We're still on the outside of the playoff picture only because Portland has a 10-8 record in conference while we're 9-11. But I'm not worried about that, we'll get in and hopefully get in the top 4 seeding's. Overall we're only 9 games out of the top spot, but in reality I know we won't finish #1.....we don't need to anyway.

The targets we should focus on is Memphis (4th, 5 games back), Golden St. (5th, 5 games back), Houston (6th, 1 1/2 games back) and Denver ( 7th, 1 1/2 games back). It's not insurmountable to catch these teams.

[AcecardZ]

Regarding Westy's midrange jumper...

He consistently used an elbow jump shot coming off a screen against us in the playoff last year and the reason it was so effective was that Bynum was the player responsible for stepping up and altering the shot as Westy came off the screen. I don't expect Westy to get nearly as much space to shoot that shot against us now with Dwight oj the court instead of Bynum. Dwight is much quicker and jumps higher than Bynum and that should be enough to force RWB to pass the ball out or take a contested shot with Dwight right up in his grill as opposed to having all day to get the shot off because Bynum just couldn't rotate over quickly enough.

Watching that play repeatedly torch us last year was so painful. We had no way to stop it.

[Jajwanda]

The matchup I more afraid of is Ibaka hitting the mid-range with Gasol trying to recover. If Howard gets healthy I would switch the defensive match ups so that Gasol is covering against the Westbrook P and R. That said I think they can handle OKC this time around. It's a difficult matchup no question, but if they can find a backup PG especially they can reduce the turnover to fast break points and then dominate the overrated Ibaka-Perkins duo.

I like facing teams that produce offense from literally two positions because they're easier to stop. Three was absurd last year.