The Blazers are for real this year, at long last.
The Rose Garden is one of the best basketball arenas anywhere.
It's not technically called "The Rose Garden" anymore, but it's where the Blazers play, so it's still the Rose Garden at heart. And whether it's because of the general community spirit of the Pacific Northwest, the lack of other major sports league options in the region, the legacy of the great teams coached by Jack Ramsay and Rick Adelman, or the mystical influence of the Sasquatch, Portland's home crowd generates more adrenaline per square inch than almost any other arena.
This might be silly, but it seems like there's something about the building that lends itself to a specific kind of exciting basketball, fast-breaking, unselfish and 3-pointer-heavy, distinct even from the rest of the country's great hoops stages. If Los Angeles is about flash, New York about folk heroes, Boston about epic drama, Indiana about face-smashing defense and Golden State about running/gunning underdogs, Portland is about the collective frenzy of a 20-0 run by the home team during which everyone on the floor makes a 3-pointer or a breakaway dunk.
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But Blazers fans, who are hardcore, haven't had a team worthy of how hardcore they are in many years.
It's been twelve seasons and counting since the Blazers won a playoff series. The team hasn't won 50 games — i.e. the simplest sign of being an NBA title contender — since 2009-2010, and finished under .500 the last two years. Their rank among NBA teams in attendance in the years since 2010? Second, second, and fourth. That's hardcore.
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And in decades past, even when they HAVE been good, they've gotten snakebit.
The most historically relevant moments in the last three decades of Blazers franchise history are 1) Michael Jordan shrugging as he was demolishing the Blazers in the 1992 Finals and 2) the Kobe-to-Shaq alley oop that propelled the Lakers past the Blazers in the 2000 Western Conference playoffs — in other words, bad things happening TO the Blazers. The nine most-viewed YouTube clips that come up when you search for "Trail Blazers" are highlights of other players scoring against them.
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But this year's Blazers team, out of nowhere, is a legit contender.
Above: ESPN basketball writers' predictions about who would win the Western Conference Northwest Division. You'll notice something about that chart: no one picked the Blazers. But guess who's in first place right now? THE BLAZERS ARE, YO! Yep. Projected for 41 wins by ESPN's generally accurate SCHOENE system (acronyms = credibility), they're off to a 22-4 start with victories over Oklahoma City, Indiana and San Antonio.
ESPN
