Rip City!

The Portland Trailblazers landed the top pick in the 2007 NBA Draft--a draft featuring the deepest class of incredibly talented players in 30 years, including the explosive Kevin Durrant from Texas and the closest thing to a can't-miss franchise player you can get, Greg Oden from Ohio State. This happened only weeks after Blazer guard Brandon Roy won the rookie of the year trophy and his teammate LaMarcus Aldridge was selected for the all-rookie 1st team. Add to that the fact that the Blazers already have Zach Randolph, Darius Miles and Sergio Rodriguez and either Durrant or Oden will be joining a young and incredibly talented team next year. After giving them a year to learn how to play well together and for the rookies to adjust to the NBA, and the team should just be rounding into playoff form in the fall of 2008, or exactly when I'll be back in Oregon and able to watch this team dominate games at the Rose Garden in person. It's a great time to be a Blazer fan, and given the struggles the fan base has endured in recent years, I think we deserve it. Only more more thing is worth mentioning (other than the fact that I've pre-ordered my 2009 NBA Champion replica ring from ESPN)--there were three or four teams actively tanking games towards the end of the season in the hopes of landing the top pick in the draft. Meanwhile, the Blazers, while not amazingly great or even that close to the playoffs in the stacked Western Conference, were playing hard every night and getting better every week. I'll I'm saying is--there's karma in basketball. Two and a half decades ago the Blazers passed on Michael Jordan...we won't make the same mistake twice!