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Just read Jason Quicks article about Oden and the pressures of being a 20 year old rookie with all the expectations surrounding him.  The following excerpt really struck me.

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    One thing I took from watching the USA vs. Spain Gold Medal game was that we need to send our best...always.  Sure, the Deron Williams, Carlos Boozers are good enough to get us through a lot of an international tournament but when the bullet hits the bone the world is catching up.  Spain really played an excellent game. Being short Calderon and using a 17 year old PG they still were able to throw a real scare into our team.  To win the gold, we needed Kobe, we needed LeBron and we needed Howard.  Think about it, if Kobe sits out this Olympics or LeBron do we win that game? The best basketball in the world is still played in the USA. The best players still come from the USA but the world has caught up to the point where to compete against these very well coached and very talented national teams we need to always send our best.

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    Seems to be a lot of momentum for The Blazers to upgrade at PG. It almost seems to me to be a rabid fervor. Traveling around the blogs and posts of the internet it almost seems to be a given that The Blazer MUST find a way to land a new PG.

    I'm certainly not against upgrading at any position any time one can. However I'd like to take a moment to simply take stock and step back. Would it be the worst thing in the world if we did NOT obtain a PG this summer? Seems strange in a way that so many seem so convinced that The Blazer absolutely must upgrade now, when what I heard most of the season was how much Steve Blake meant to this team.  I kept hearing all season about how he was a steadying influence, ran the team well and we were so lucky to have gotten him back. Plus, there were season long raves about how well Brandon handled offensive exectution during the 4th quarter.

   I know we have all seen the success of Chris Paul and Williams and recently Steve Nash, so there is a strong impetus to suggest to teams that you must have a dominating PG but I suggest that The Blazers don't necessarily need to obtain one right now. Blake, Jack, Sergio, and we have Koponen albeit a unknown in the pipeline.  Could the best move for The Blazers just be to show continued patience with the group we have? I think our next step in development is becoming a Playoff team, not "winning" a championship, and with Brandon, Aldridge, Oden, Fernandez, Outlaw, and our stable of PG choices in Blake, Jack and Sergio I'm thinking that step is possible and plausible even if we stand pat in the PG department.

   I just don't want a rush, or sloppy unbalanced trade to be made in an effort to bring in a slightly better PG that might not even be as good as Jack or Sergio in 3 years.  Of course keep the phone lines open, keep the discussions going but unless it's a "Pritch-Slap" type of trade I'm for a conservative approach this off-season. I think The Blazers are in the enviable position of being able to be conservative. We don't need to make any move out of desperation but strangely when it comes to obtaining a PG the tone I'm hearing is almost desperate and I don't understand that.

   I'm weak, I'll admit it. Since the formal inception of a diary of the week "contest" I'm afraid to even post a diary.

   Before we were being evaluated, I did not care. So what if I posted a diary and only got 1 response? Big deal.

   So what if I got 50 responses and they were all off-topic and spiraled into mayhem? Burn baby Burn was alright.

   But now? I don't know....how can you do it? You pour a bit of your creative self into a posting, post it, only to check back later and find nobody gives a damn about your opinion. I could be thicker skinned about it when meaningless definitions weren't being placed on the diaries.

   Before I can round into shape, I'd like to see some "Responses of The Week". That's where you get some real creativity.

   In the meantime humor me and pretend this had something to do with The Blazers. Please.  

   I'm not at all convinced that obtaining Shaq will result in Phoenix improving or winning a championship. The most I can muster for the move is a "maybe" in relationship to potential results. For me it's not so much the conflict of having a slow moving center put into what has been the fastest paced team in the league, I actually think that can be made to work. Sabonis was far from a runner by the time he reached Portland, and we played him with Rasheed and Stoudemire and were able to strike a good balance of breaking and half-court, and I think Phoenix can do the same. The big issue with Shaq is just how much left does he have PERIOD. Next season he's turning 37...I don't know if he has enough left in the tank, regardless of how much he might want it, or think he has.

  But wait, lest you think this is just a diary bemoaning the moves of a western conference rival. Given all that I just said, I still like the move by Phoenix. Why? Because they looked at their team and decided they weren't good enough to win a championship, decided very very good wasn't good enough and rolled the dice. I like that. That takes guts. So even though I'm not convinced it will work, I admire Phoenix for taking the chance. It would of been far easier to just stay "as-is", be one of the best but fall short again. Leaving Nash another year older and Phoenixs hopes another year paler. This gives them a different look and reasons to think they can win. Is Shaq so great a talent that put alongside Nash, Stoudemire and The Phoenix talent he might be able to contribute the difference? ...like I said, maybe, and when we are talking Championships I think maybe is better than "not going to happen" which really was the reality with Phoenix pre-trade.

  Kudos to Phoenix for rolling those dice, win or lose. If it backfires the fans will complain. If the next two seasons is Shaq fading like cheap wallpaper then Phoenix management is going to take a lot of flak. I'm sure they all know this. So I admire their guts for making the trade.

   I remember when The Blazers were one of the top teams in the league with Kersey, Buck, Clyde and Porter, Duckworth. Barkley wanted out of Philadelphia. There were rumors we could obtain him for Kersey and some change. At the time we were Championship contending, legitimate. I did not want to make the move, because Kersey was one of my favorite Blazers, and as I said, we were great anyway. In retrospect? What if we had the guts to roll the dice? Would a team of Drexler, Porter, Barkley, Buck and Duck faired better?....maybe....

   Speculation is never an answer, but I admire those organizations that don't settle for very, very good. Phoenix made a move for a championship. Will it work? I don't think so, BUT I admire the roll of the dice they were willing to take.    

   I just needed to get this off my mind. Yesterday when I first heard of the Pau Gasol trade and the ugly details, I had a flashback to childhood.

  One time my Dad, my brother and myself were playing a game of Risk. I had dominated, and taken over 1/2 of the world! Yee Ha! at 12 years old beating your Dad and your Brother at Risk is a big thing. But just as my dreams of board game world domination were about to be solidified, my Brother and my Dad made a peace pact, refusing to fight each other and focusing only on me.

   What resulted was a combined effort of two opposing forces that destroyed my effort to take over the world. Before I was relegated to the embarrasing home base of Australia, I think I threw the board against the wall, sending millions of plastic roman Numerals all over the living room. It was a Napoleonic temper tantrum, but I thought the peace pact was not in the spirit of the game.

  So when I heard the details of the "trade" Memphis made with the Lakers, that was much the same feeling I had.

  Like Memphis and The Lakers had joined forces to ruin my day. Despite the emergence of Bynum, I looked at the Lakers as losing competitive relevancy over the next few years. Damn, now they will be a true rival.

   I still think The Blazers are the team of the future. Plus for The L*kers or The Blazers you never know what the future will hold, there are no guarantees. It was just I was so looking forward to our envitable assencion and what I saw as The L*kers inevitable decline, and now it's going to be that much harder.

   Well what I've learned since I was a kid, is to enjoy the battles. I think this is the dawning of a rebirth once again of The Blazers vs. The L*kers, they will once again be a relevant rival to The Blazers.

   I am posting this here, it's not exactly a typical diary thread but I'd like some feedback. I'm sure most or a lot of the fans on this site are familiar with Greg Odens YardBarker site. I just watched his latest video posting.

  It was a copyrighted Blazer Productions clip. I haven't been to The Blazers official website but my guess is that it is running on that site as well. I was disappointed. Not in content, as it was interesting enough. Some comments from Oden about rehabbing and watching games to learn from them, some comments from Bayno (I think) about Oden getting the opportunity to learn by watching. For a Blazer fan, not a bad way to spend a minute.

  My hope is that Oden continues to place real unproduced self made video clips on his Yardbarker site, or even The Blazer site if The Blazers want a piece of the action. I got a sense of the genuine Oden from his self camera held, self spoken videos. It was refreshingly unproduced, unscripted. In this day and age it actually felt somewhat unique.

  I know as Oden "grows up" and his career progresses it might just become more difficult for him to maintain that level of connection. However it was a nice insite to see non-professionally produced video and read semi-spontaneous postings from Oden complete with the occasional spelling error. As a fan it made me feel I was getting a glimpse of Oden the human being, not Oden the N.B.A. "product".

   I'm not sure this is even a problem at all. Oden often posts and has posted other videos from interviews and commercials, I'm just hoping that he continues and is allowed to continue to post his own personally made comments and observations. Hopefully this isn't a case of The Blazers, or Odens advisors trying to control the image or "product".

   Oden showing me his messy apartment and his favorite watermelon and Cookie Crisp seems so much more real, and unrehearsed than Oden carefully telling me about learning from watching the game, followed by Bayno more or less repeating the same message.

  I suppose there must be both. The Marketed Oden, and Hopefully the "real" Oden. Even before we drafted him, his "realness" was a quality I liked about this newest Blazer. I hope he is allowed to continue to share this with fans, unrehearsed and unscripted.  

   Without naming names, and just remaining general, I think we can all remember the players and management of the past. Unfortunately the past few seasons have often felt like walking through a tornado. We all remember the turmoil, trouble and seemingly lost direction of the franchise.

  I guess all that is what makes "now" so nice. I can remember in the past seeing links to Blazer articles, or interviews and actually being scared to click on them. Why? Because there was such a good chance the news was going to be bad, or the commentary from the player offensive or stupid. Or that I'd be watching a "press conference" introducing the newest Blazer Trent Hassel.

  My point in bringing up this darkness at a bright spot? Because it is so great that The Blazers are playing good, acting good and sounding good. I don't fear a sound bite with any of our players anymore. I don't scratch my head at the actions of management, and I don't get the nagging headache that I often got reading the local sports section.

  The good times have returned and it's GOOD.

  An interview with KP? Great turn it up! Brandon? Oden? Blake? Aldridge? Jack? go through the roster, do I have the subconcious fear any of these guys are going to say something counter productive or damaging, or down right embarrasing? No! Refreshing to have the interview end with myself feeling better about the team and the player as opposed to wondering about the wisdom of trying to sweat the alcohol binge of the night before off in practice.

   Nothing sounds better than Rip City right now.