What Portlanders really care about

Watch this YouTube video titled, “Scenes from the Trail Blazers Draft Lottery Party”. For those unaware of how the NBA draft lottery works, it’s like a beauty pageant in which the winners are announced in reverse order, with the last named having the right to sign the best player coming out of the college ranks. The Blazers ended with the first pick in the draft. Even if you don’t follow professional basketball, the shared, almost insane joy with each team called that isn’t the Blazers will bring a smile to any true Portlander’s face.

The following is a guest post by my firstborn son, Luke, who is a Junior at Western Oregon University. His words, more than mine, convey what many Portlanders really care about.

“Does it make me less of a man that I shed tears watching that?” – Me, in a text message to my friend Scott earlier today.

I sent the YouTube link to my mom after finding it on the official Blazers website. A great video of GM Kevin Pritchard addressing the Blazer internal staff after getting back from New Jersey, is available here.

591413. The luckiest number in Blazer franchise history. Or more specifically, 5-9-14-13. Those were the lottery ball numbers drawn on Tuesday. The chance of getting the #1 pick was 5.3%, and Portland got it. It is ridiculous to think of the utter simplicity of it all, really. A bunch of lottery balls bouncing around, and that affects a team’s future for the next decade or so.

Watching it live on ESPN, while taking to my good buddy Scott Hughley (who was not able to be in front of a TV to see it) on the phone is something I will never forget. The reason being: Greg Oden and Kevin Durant. Two of the most highly touted prospects in a very, very long time. I won’t go into specifics to bore the non-sports fans, but essentially, if the Blazers got one of the top two picks in the draft, our team would be living the good life for years to come. That’s why there is such an explosion of delight in the YouTube video at the revealing of the #3 pick. Trust me, that same roar was happening here in my dorm at Western Oregon University, as well as countless other places around the Pacific Northwest as Seattle ended up with the #2 pick.

Once I was able to convince Scott I wasn’t lying to him, I immediately called about 5 of my friends. Text messages started pouring in. You see, to fans like me, people that wanted to give the “new look” Blazers a chance, who became disillusioned with the Jail Blazers and fell back in love with the hard nosed play of Brandon Roy, the great coaching of Nate McMillan, and the never give up attitude of this year’s team – even when intentionally losing at the end would have helped their chances of winning the lottery – this moment is a sign that Blazer Mania is back.

I joined a group of Blazers fans at WOU a year or so ago on one of the all too popular social networking websites I belong to, FaceBook.com, titled “The Last Remaining Blazer Fans.” The group had, up to yesterday, 13 people in it. And while I never communicated with any of them, I so highly enjoyed watching games the past few years that I seriously considered, along with my friend Clarke Miller, buying season tickets for next year. Two years ago, when the Blazers had a record of 21-61, Clarke and I went to four games. I called them “pilgrimages” to see LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and the like. The Blazers won all of them. We joked back then, as we do now, that if we can single-handedly make the Blazers win 20% of their games by attending, they’d win at least 41 if we went to every home game.

Scott, Clarke, and I only attended one Blazer game this year (against the Denver Nuggets – again, a win), but we could tell the magic was back in the building. It’s hard not to like a young, scrappy team. Also, free Chalupas aren’t bad either.

Which brings me to my point. On one of my favorite shows, ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption (which my mom hates because she thinks it’s just two guys yelling at each other, but I digress), Michael Wilbon, a writer for the Washington Post, asserted that there is a 100% chance that Greg Oden will win a championship in his career with the Blazers. Bob Ryan, a Boston columist on SportsCenter later in the day said “People of Portland, let it be known: sometime in the next 3 to 5 years, you’ll win a championship with Greg Oden, and it won’t be the last.”

While there is still a decision to be made on which of these two great players to pick (my take is that franchise centers like Greg Oden come along too infrequently to pass up), the outcome is the same. Interest in the Blazers is back. Tickets will be harder to get, sure, but there’s still nothing like buying a $10 ticket to sit in the back of the upper level, to squint and see our hometown team, in our only major professional sporting events, try and buck the odds and become the young guys that could. Here’s a team that Portland deserves and can rally around for years to come. Blazermaina is back. And while I’m taking such pronostications as Wilbon’s and Ryan’s with the pessimism that a Blazer fan has to have in order to survive, and I’d be very careful about anointing anyone a champion before even he has played a single game in the NBA, I’d have to say that the day that we won the lottery will go down as one of the biggest in Portland history.

That, and the day that we finally trade Darius Miles.