* April 20 (Ticker) *-- In a season of lows, a pair of Portland Trail Blazers ended the campaign with career highs.
*NBA TV highlights from
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Travis Outlaw scored 20 points and rookie Ha Seung Jin added 13 as the Trail Blazers gave a glimpse of their future in a 106-103 victory over the Los Angeles Lakers.
With their worst record in 32 years, the Trail Blazers (27-55) missed the playoffs for the second straight season. In addition to a series of injuries to key players, coach Maurice Cheeks had a run-in with Darius Miles and was fired shortly thereafter. But there appears to be hope for Portland. Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Damon Stoudamire and Nick Van Exel are free agents, giving the team approximately $40 million of salary cap relief. It has a proven young star in forward Zach Randolph and a deep core of energetic youngsters.
Two of those are Outlaw, a second-year forward drafted directly out of high school, and the 7-3, 305-pound Ha, a 19-year-old South Korean. Outlaw made 7-of-12 shots and 5-of-6 free throws and Ha made 6-of-7 shots and pulled down five rebounds.
Interim coach Kevin Pritchard also has been giving increased time to rookie guard Sebastian Telfair, who had 17 points and 11 assists, and rookie small forward Viktor Khryapa, who had eight points and seven boards.
All four were on the floor down the stretch. After Kobe Bryant scored seven straight points for the Lakers to give them a 101-100 lead with 3:22 to play, Ruben Patterson sank two free throws to give the Blazers the lead for good.
With 1:45 to go, Ha threw in a lefthanded follow shot for a 104-101 lead. Khryapa took a charge from Bryant, who drew a foul from Patterson on the next possession and made two free throws with 30 seconds left.
With the shot clock running down, Khryapa penetrated and fed Outlaw for a dunk with 7.1 seconds to play. The Russian rookie tied up Bryant and tipped the jump ball to Patterson, who dribbled out the clock.
Patterson scored 18 points for the Trail Blazers, who were 14 games worse than last season and finished below .500 for the first time in 15 years but avoided last place in the Northwest Division.
Bryant scored 37 points for the Lakers (34-48), who fell off 22 games from last season. After reaching the NBA Finals four times in five years, the Lakers missed the playoffs for the first time since 1994
Dramatic themes often include current issues,
societal ills, and problems, concerns or injustices, such as racial
prejudice, religious intolerance (such as anti-Semitism), drug
addiction, poverty, political unrest, the corruption of power,
alcoholism, class divisions, sexual inequality, mental illness,
corrupt societal institutions, violence toward women or other
explosive issues of the times.
These films have successfully drawn
attention to the issues by taking advantage of the topical interest of
the subject. Although dramatic films have often dealt frankly and
realistically with social problems, the tendency has been for
Hollywood, especially during earlier times of censorship, to exonerate
society and institutions and to blame problems on an individual, who
more often than not, would be punished for his/her transgressions.
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