The Portland Trail Blazers faced New Orleans four times this season, but they have never played the iteration of the Pelicans they will face come playoff time.

With Wednesday night’s 102-93 win over Utah at the Moda Center, the Trail Blazers clinched the Western Conference’s No. 3 playoff seed, the team’s highest since 2000, and a first-round date with a Pelicans squad whose lineup has changed significantly from matchup to matchup this season against Portland.

Point guard Rajon Rondo did not play in two of the four games the teams split, while MVP candidate Anthony Davis, commonly referred to as “The Brow” for his famous unibrow, played just five minutes in the first meeting on Oct. 24 — a Portland victory at home — and not at all in the second, a Pelicans win on Jan. 12 in New Orleans.

And then there is DeMarcus Cousins, the mercurial and uber-talented big man who averaged 33.6 points and 13.3 rebounds in three games against Portland this season before suffering a season-ending Achilles tendon injury in late January.

“When Cousins went down, everybody kind of wrote them off and they’ve done a great job of really competing since then,” Blazers coach Terry Stotts said Wednesday.

Said Portland center Ed Davis: “Big Cuz is definitely a top-three center in the league and he changes their team a lot. They’re a totally different team without him.

“They’re a good team, definitely got an MVP-caliber player in Anthony Davis and we’re going to put a lot of focus and attention on him. But I like our chances.”

The Blazers regained their mojo in the win over Utah.

More focus on Davis is one thing. Containing him is another. Davis averaged 11 rebounds, 2.6 blocks, and a career-high 28.2 points and 2.3 assists this season, and since Cousins’ injury, those numbers have bumped up to 30.4 points, 11.8 rebounds, 2.2 assists, 2.0 steals and 3.1 blocks.

“Obviously,” Portland guard C.J. McCollum said, “everything starts with Anthony Davis.”

Game 1 is Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Portland. Game 2 is Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. before the series goes to New Orleans for games on Thursday and Saturday.

The Pelicans finished ninth in the league in offensive rating and 13th in defensive rating, while the Blazers are 16th and eighth, respectively.

Blazers All-Star guard Damian Lillard had 41 points in the latest matchup in late March, a Portland win in New Orleans.

“Dame had a hell of a game, but it’s playoffs and you can put everything behind what happened before,” Stotts said. “The playoffs is a different animal.”

Lillard, asked about the Blazers-Pelicans matchup Wednesday after scoring 36 points, replied: “I like it.”

“They stole one from us here and we felt like that was a game that we should have had and had a bad third quarter,” he said. “They got obviously Anthony Davis, Jrue Holiday, Rondo, E’twaun Moore — they got a lot of guys that make them a dangerous team. You add (Nikola) Mirotic to the picture and he’s having huge games, too. They’re a really tough team and we’re in for a dogfight.”

Portland will enter the playoffs at nearly full strength. Forward Moe Harkless, sidelined for the past nine games after undergoing surgery on his left knee, said Wednesday that his return will be predicated on “how I feel. You ask me if I could play today, no. So we’ve just go to take it day by day.”

Wednesday’s season finale offered a positive development for the Trail Blazers in the return of their 3-point shooting after a nearly monthlong stretch in which their deep shooting ranked second-worst in the league. Portland made 9 of its 24 3-point attempts against the Jazz.

It was also the second consecutive game in which its opponent was held to 37 percent shooting.

“We’ve been a top-10 defense team all this year, it wasn’t nothing new to us, that’s what we do,” Davis said. “We get out on the defensive end, and if we’ve got it going on the offensive end, the other team is in trouble.”