First things first: this will be a longer casual ramble than usual. Talking about the Portland Trail Blazers always is. Especially when considering just how wild this season has turned out.
In no way should anyone have expected what happened in the cross over from January to February.
For two weeks there, the Portland Trail Blazers were truly red hot and rolling, winning ten of eleven games with the only loss coming in a competitive bout against the Oklahoma City Thiefs.1 And it all came crashing down in a trio of games against Minnesota and Denver just before the All-Star Break.
Still, during that win streak the Blazers beat a list of teams that included: Chicago, Miami, Orlando (twice), Charlotte, Milwaukee, Phoenix (twice), Indiana and Sacramento.
There are some caveats here: the majority of the wins came during a seven-game homestand, and a majority of the teams were not playoff certain; Milwaukee and Indiana were easily the best of the lot. But a double-dip of wins against Phoenix and Orlando is no easy feat; the Phoenix games, in particular, were another one of those “baseball series” with two clashes in three nights. The Trail Blazers smashed a tired Suns squad in the first round, then gripped them like a bulldog through overtime in the second.
Orlando, on the other hand, was a pair of bamboozling blowouts where the Trail Blazers showed the Magic—a very good defensive team—just how it’s done. Both games saw Portland dial up a pressure package like a slow cooker, frustrating Paolo Banchero and negating Franz Wagner through the talisman defense of Toumani Camara. If you haven’t seen the Thinking Basketball video showcasing Camara, it’s an absolute must-watch. You can stop reading, I won’t mind.
One of the key talking points during the ongoing streak was the mentality shift among the fans. Talk radio and most of the critical observers are probably right to mark out that this has left the Trail Blazers in an unfortunate limbo: too good to truly tank, too incomplete to compete. But for Portland’s sports culture, a Trail Blazers team that was humming as well as they were is a panacea to the dismal cold.
Hand-wringing about draft position cannot warm the fandom like the belief that your team will win, opposition be damned.
It didn’t feel like that while it happened. It felt it could have ended at any moment. The front office could have decided “wait, wait, wait, this is too much” and shut down key players at key moments. Joe Cronin could have played spoiler, but he never did. Instead fans came to each game wondering how the team was going to find a way to win that night.
There were plenty of moments like that for my friend Bagheera and I—we both attended six of the seven games during the home stretch—thought the team was barbecue chicken, but then, some how, some way, the team prevailed.
On an invite from my Uncle D, I went to the Orlando game where the Magic jumped out to a 10-nothing lead. It felt like a sudden curtain reveal.
“Surprise, it was a hoax all along!”
But then, the Trail Blazers snatched that curtain and proceeded to thrash the Magic behind it until opening up again with an 119-89 victory. By halftime, my Uncle D had come up with a new game of “Well, it was a good opening punch from the Magic…”
The rules were simple: first you say “Well, it was a good opening punch from the Magic…” and then you say “…but then the Blazers responded with an X-(Y-minus-10) run.”
For example. “well, it was a good opening punch from the Magic but then the Blazers responded with a 62-43 91-63 119-79 run.”
My cousin Maria could only roll her eyes at our rote shtick.
Other times, the wins felt like fortune. Divine gifts of fate, as was the case against the Indiana Pacers. Going into the game, Bagheera and I felt dead in the water. After the grueling overtime win against the Phoenix Suns, we could barely muster enough to cheer for the first and second quarters. Then the Trail Blazers made a bit of a breakaway in third.
It all seemed hunky-dory until Indiana changed their game. The Pacer reserves flipped the script on Trail Blazers and hounded every ball-handler on the court to narrow the lead to under five points with seven minutes to go in the fourth quarter. Had they stayed for another minute, it seemed inevitable that Portland was going to cough up lead.
But then Indiana’s head coach Rick Carlisle out-coached himself, making a complete line change substitution. Suddenly the fire hydrant just stopped, and the Trail Blazers burned their guests en route to a 23-point win.
The team would follow up the win with a close one against the Sacramento Kings. Hanging with my friend Floater, the game was back-and-forth, but going into the last
The closest thing that can compare to this kind of run happened in 2007-2008. The Blazers were coming off the news that Greg Oden, the prodigal center, was out for his rookie season and struggling to find a groove when Travis Outlaw hit a fading jumper off the glass against the Memphis Grizzlies. What happened next was basketball Arcadia. A 13 game win streak, a run of 18 wins in 19 games, the start of an incredible sellout streak that turned the Rose Garden in to a garden of Shangri-La, and a proof of concept that a Brandon Roy-LaMarcus Aldridge duo could power a team to compete for playoff spots.
And it’s not that the Trail Blazers haven’t gone on double-figure win streaks since then. It was just the first hot streak that meant something in a while. And I think that’s what this recent win streak tells us: this is the first time the team won big and it meant something more than just a W-sized hole in the side of a tank job.
Will the Trail Blazers make the play-in? We’ll see. There’s definitely an opportunity. Losing a draft pick in a stacked draft, or even sliver of a chance for the top pick in a stacked draft, however, is a hard price to pay.
But this win streak means the Trail Blazers have a young core that can win games. They have a talent path that can take promising young athletes and turn them into certified professional ballplayers. They don’t need a Cooper Flagg like a fish needs water in the desert. There might be a sleeping dragon in this team already, and it may be waking up.2
And that is something to cherish.
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1 Nothing will ever change my hatred of the Thunder. I’m not a Seattle fan of any sport, but the Blazers-SuperSonics rivalry was special and Clay Bennett stole it all with the aid of David Stern. Had it just been a matter of stealing a franchise and leaving the records and history in Seattle, I would be more “over it.” As it stands, I wish nothing but ruin upon that franchise, ownership group and fanbase. And yeah, I know the plural is thieves, but I like that it rhymes and has a similar rhythm to a certain NFL dynasty. So before this becomes a ramble of its own: Fuck The Thiefs. Seattle was robbed, and Portland was hurt.
2 If were an opposing team, I would be terrified of what this fish could evolve into if they found a player like Cooper Flagg.
The Casual Ramble 