Jun 23 2009
It’s On (Hopefully)
Draft fever has officially taken over the whole of Blazer nation. I’ve never seen so many fans just go crazy over who or who won’t be the guy to be selected by the Blazers to be stored overseas for like five years until he comes over, Arvydas Sabonis style, and has bulging back discs explode like so many microwaved potatoes. This hysteria is the appendix of Blazer fans. We evolved to have it because it fulfilled that dire need of giving us something to hope for after seasons of players being convicted for increasingly absurd crimes. (Qyntel Woods bribed a sherpa into robbing a Build-a-Bear Workshop? Why not?) Now it’s just a vestige of that silly past. How often do contenders get an immediate impact player late in the first round? Is it really possible for a rookie to change the fortunes of a team that tied for the second-best record in the Western Conference? Let’s just face it, this draft pick at 24 will give us a player that will, at the very best, help us gain maybe one more win this season. (Of course, the natural improvement of our other players could net even more than that.)
Even worse, Kevin Pritchard basically lives to make every sports writer and blogger wrong. When everyone expected a trade at the deadline and as we all wasted countless hours figuring out ways to trade Travis Outlaw while keeping the contracts just so, he decided just to stay put. Any possible mock draft for the Blazers can’t take into account where the Blazers will actually be picking. Does anyone actually think they’ll be using all five of those draft picks this year? The only foreseeable outcome I could see from drafting and keeping players with all these picks is some bizarre and perverse Paul Allen experiment that takes place in a secret research facility twenty stories below the Space Needle to create the perfect athlete from the body parts of the cream of the second round. It’s that simple: Paul Allen creating Frankenballer in the Nega-Needle is likelier than us not making a trade.
That’s the statement we’re receiving right now from Allen’s terrible cyber-punk subterranean lair, too (The not making a trade thing, not the playing God thing). The only tidbit of actual information that we’re receiving from the Blazer camp at this moment is the equivalent of these two words: “It’s on.” How on is it? Trail Post hopes that it’s at least “til the break of dawn.” “Like Donkey Kong” would be acceptable, but we’d prefer if he was “in a thong.” “Like Stevie Ray Vaughan” would simply be inexcusable.
What’s the moral of all of this? A tidbit of actual information is an oasis during the slow time leading to the draft.
I’m tired of trade machines and salary cap figures. I’m tired of speculation. Even flimsy news like this is the stuff to propel a fan to Thursday. We know we’ll have something under the tree this Christmas. Some of us use the trade machine and shake the present around trying to surmise the contents. Me, I’ll just let it sit there under the tree, content with the thought that it’ll be opened soon. After all - it’s on.
