Blazer Recollections, Part 1

I've been a Blazers fan for most of my life. I have vague recollection of the Clyde Drexler era, but having been born in '83, I was too young to remember how close they got in '90-'93. I became an avid fan when they acquired Kenny Anderson, Isiah Rider, and Rasheed Wallace in the summer of '96, and at the same time they finally got Arvydas Sabonis to come over to the league. I got to go to my first Blazers game in November of that year, when Sabonis hit a shot to help the Blazers beat the Kings 92-90 in overtime. I was really excited when Portland landed Damon Stoudamire in a trade right before the trading deadline later during that same season. I recollect the intense groans I had at Sean Elliott's Memorial Day Miracle in Game 2 of the '99 Conference Finals, then the following year when they had the infamous meltdown in the 4th quarter of Game 7 of the Conference Finals against the Lakers. Although I realized those Blazer teams were loaded in the frontcourt, I couldn't believe they traded away Jermaine O'Neal after giving him almost no playing time for four years.

When I went to southern California to go to college in the fall of 2001, I didn't follow the team as closely except when they happened to play against the Lakers or Clippers and the games were regionally televised. But I looked on, from a distance, as the Blazers accumulated players with off-court problems and questionable attitudes that, at times, made previous questionable Blazers that I was very familiar with like Rider, Wallace and Gary Trent look like goody-two-shoes. Qyntel Woods. Darius Miles. Sebastian Telfair. Zach Randolph. How do you root for guys like that? I didn't disown the only major professional sports team in my home state, but I actually hoped that they would lose a lot with the guys they had so the Blazer executives would realize that their plan was failing in more ways than one. There was no doubt that it was rebuilding time.

When I came back to Oregon after graduating in '06, I really didn't know much about the current Blazers. I had rarely seen them play, and when I had there weren't any players that I recognized except a couple that I had seen when they were in college. I was excited about the '06 draft, when the up-and-coming GM, Kevin Pritchard, pulled several brilliant trades in a row and managed to land one of my favorite college players from the year before, Brandon Roy, along with a promising big from Texas named LaMarcus Aldridge and a relatively unknown guard from Spain, Sergio Rodriguez.