PORTLAND, Ore. — Lacking the guts to win, the Nuggets will fold in the NBA playoffs and go to the beach. Or so the fake tough guys from the granola-paved streets of Portland seem to believe.

“They got some sassy dudes over there,” Blazers guard Seth Curry said late Thursday. Then he added how little Portland respects Denver by calling the Nuggets: “Front-runners.”

You think that’s insulting? Then you should see an image of Blazers guard Evan Turner flipping the bird at the Nuggets that should burn in the brains of Denver players and rankle them from now until tip-off of Game 7, when a winner will be finally declared in this increasingly chippy NBA playoff series.

After guard C.J. McCollum stuck a dagger in the Nuggets with a 3-point shot late in Portland’s 119-108 victory that pushed this series to the limit, fans in the Moda Center went bonkers. Denver coach Michael Malone called a timeout and McCollum retreated to Blazers bench, repeatedly nodding with the smug self-approval of a gunslinger putting another notch in his belt.

And then — with one minute, 19 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter — the Blazers’ simmering disrespect of Denver got truly insulting: Turner, an end-of-rotation scrub for Portland, celebrated McCollum’s big, decisive jumper with a shot of his own.

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Turner raised his right arm, then erected a middle finger and flipped off the Nuggets.

Now that’s funny. This flippant bird in the hand of Turner seemed a little passive-aggressive by the standards of the friendly and mellow Pacific Northwest. I knew Maurice Lucas, and as an intimidating enforcer, Turner adds absolutely nothing to Portland’s basketball legacy.

Shown a photo taken by The Denver Post of Turner giving the Nuggets that one-finger salute, guard Will Barton was amused. Do these Blazers scare Denver? No way, no how. Let’s see Turner come to Colorado and put on that same bad-dude act.

The flower children of Portland were feeling their stone-ground oats in victory. The loud, old arena the Blazers call home is a classic, and it rocked in Game 6. At halftime, with the home team leading by six points, as Strahinja Jokic, the older brother of Denver’s star center, walked up the steps of Section 111 to the concourse, a dude with a man bun and a scruffy beard jumped in the aisle alongside Jokic’s and screamed: “Let’s go, Blazers!”

“I got in his face,” Blazers fan Justin Reich proudly told me.

I informed Reich it’s probably unwise to mess with Strahinja Jokic, who is built like The Mountain from “Game of Thrones.”

“Is that Jokic’s brother? It is not. Really?” said Reich, who reasoned heckling a giant of a man couldn’t hurt too badly. “What’s the worse-case scenario? I would wake up eventually.”

Earlier in the series, Portland center Enes Kanter decried the lack of civility from the crowd during Game 2 at the Pepsi Center in Denver. Many of us living in Donald Trump’s America, where the routine crassness of name-calling is the new standard of anti-social behavior, understood and appreciated Kanter’s lament.

But now the bad-dude Blazers want to rumble? OK. Game on.

Barton got in a shoving match with the NBA’s “other” Curry midway through the fourth quarter, after a charging foul called against Nikola Jokic resulted in Portland’s Zach Colllins tumbling hard to the court.

A tussle ensued between players on the floor. Barton poked Seth Curry in the eye. Game officials assigned technical fouls to Nuggets Torrey Craig and Barton, as well as to Collins and Curry.

“I’m not going to let nobody push me,” Craig said.

But throughout these playoffs, hasn’t the strategy against Denver been as crudely obvious as a common playground bully?

In the opening round, San Antonio tried to intimidate Denver, with center Jacob Poeltl using big, boney knees as a weapon on illegal screens against anything that moved in a Nuggets uniform. And now these Blazers, who’ve never won anything, think they can make Denver blink in Game 7. Related Articles Nuggets careful not to respect Lakers “too much” as confidence builds in Conference Finals matchup

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“Somebody’s got to go home, somebody’s got to go to Cabo,” said McCollum. He scored 30 points on a night when the Blazers connected on 15 of their 33 attempts from beyond the 3-point arc.

The Nuggets can’t afford such weak-minded defense with their season on the line. Is Denver really going to let the Blazers come into their house and burn it down while talking smack?

The Nuggets insist they’re ready for a fight.

“We need all the motivation we can get,” Craig said. “If it gets chippy, it gets chippy.”