Suns burn Blazers with hot 3rd quarter

The turnovers were still coming at a rapid pace. The first-half offense produced 41 points and showed there are still plenty of knocks and pings in the Suns’ offensive engine.

SLIDESHOW: Suns. vs. Trail Blazers

Suns notebook: 'Shogun’ Shaq schools Oden

But when Shaquille O’Neal and Amaré Stoudemire combine for 36 points and 26 rebounds and the Suns shoot 53 percent from the field and six Phoenix players find double figures, the errors aren’t so glaring and the results are usually positive.

In a game that looked fairly familiar to the first meeting three weeks ago, the Suns schooled the Blazers inside and out and used a hot-shooting third quarter (12-for-19 field goals and six 3-pointers) to build enough of a cushion to carry home a 102-92 win Saturday night.

The Suns still had the sour taste of back-to-back losses to the Jazz and Lakers in their mouths, but settled themselves against a Portland team coming off two wins where they scored 116 and 117 points and looked sharp doing it. But the Blazers were limited to 39 percent shooting from the field and haven’t broken 100 in two tries.

The Suns have now beaten Portland 11 straight times, and made sure they avoided a three-game losing streak for the first time since Feb. 9-14 of 2007 – the longest current streak in the NBA. And they were able to overcome 18 more turnovers and 17 offensive rebounds by the Blazers – who only got 17 second-chance points out of them because they shot 39 percent from the field (35-for-90).

“It was a good bounce-back, a good recovery game,” said Grant Hill, who hit 7 of 11 shots and contributed 15 points and five rebounds in 26 minutes – his best game off the bench this season. “Does it mean we turned a corner? Who knows? We pounded inside, but we also got into our free-flowing offense some and that’s a good sign.

“This week we’ve had two games where we put it together – Portland and Detroit – and two games when we didn’t, (losses to) Utah and L.A. Hopefully, we’ll learn that when we have that balance and that energy, we can pretty much play with anybody.”

The game was billed as the first meeting between O’Neal and Portland’s Greg Oden, but Oden comes off the bench and the two didn’t spend a lot of time on the court together. Before Oden checked in, O’Neal already had six points and seven rebounds, including a hammer jam off a Stoudemire miss that was a preview of things to come.

“It’s always a key for us to establish our paint, and we got points,” Phoenix coach Terry Porter said. “The areas of concern are rebounding and again, the turnovers.”

But things looked better in the third quarter, when the Suns scored 31 points and turned a two-point deficit around with an 11-0 run. Matt Barnes and Raja Bell combined for five 3-pointers while Steve Nash (16 points, seven assists) added seven points of his own.

“Nash is still orchestrating that offense and getting everyone involved and knowing the situations,” Portland coach Nate McMillan said. “We go up (59-57) and he settles the team down, and gets the ball where it needs to go. That, guys, is a two-time MVP. Shaq did some good things … but that show runs with Nash.”