Utah Upbeat As Portland Slow On The Trail

Headed to my second NBA game at the Moda Centre on a rather chilly, crisp, cold and clear night in downtown Portland, Oregon to watch the Portland Trailblazers play host to the Utah Jazz. I caught the Max to the Rose Centre and was a little long as per usual when you cross through cities on a system that should be heavy rail, but that's the US for you. I got into the venue but I had to hand over my selfie stick to the cloak room. While this is a standard policy for virtually every stadium around the world, I thought id just have it in my pocket until post game for some after match selfies.

I found my seat with no difficulties, but there was a couple who had placed their coats on my seat and I didn't want to be squashed up next to them so I sat behind them where there were a couple of empty seats. I sat there for the first half and a couple of minutes into the third quarter until a family decided to finally arrive after eating and drinking on the concourse level. I don't understand why would you spend this money on basketball tickets, come all this way, (Portland is very sparsely populated) and not watch the game live and not on some screen in a concourse food outlet?

I happily moved, but went to the opposite side of my seat to get myself a better, or different perspective. I had no problems finding a seat as people were starting to leave half way through the third quarter as Utah were dominating Portland. The home side were competitive in the first half only trailing by 6 at half time. However, Portland's poor shooting and woeful rebounding, steals and foul count had given the Jazz easy opportunities to sink for threes and take free throws to blow out the lead beyond single digits and ended up running home with a 30 point win, 120 to 90.

The food was the same but this time I had the chicken spicy burger. It was 12 dollars also and I had a collectors cup on top of that for another 12. The total was 24 dollars and I have to say that the chips were once again a bit average. They were garlic fries, but I had to add some more salt and have ranch and barbecue sauce to add flavour. The burger was dray and utterly tasteless with little to no spice what so ever. I found this disappointing as in the United States if something is spicy, you know that there will be a bit of a tickle, unlike in Australia where it is a land devoid of anything remotely spicy.

The bread was dry and felt stale, but I could be wrong as bread in the US is usually a bit dry and not overly soft like back home. The lettuce wasn't bad, but the tomato was not pleasant. The chicken patty was bone dry and without any flavour. It only just had that crumbed taste and it did break apart easily like regular chicken. However, all in all it was not very nice.

A shame that the food on this occasion was even worse and that the Trailblazers played even worse still. But It is a neat little basketball stadium in a small Pacific North-West town that I am sure that I will be returning to at some stage in the future.