Dave~ You took me and my naive understanding of NBA basketball to school. That was fantastic!

I will say that there are a couple things that give me hope that we could surprise someone in the playoffs:

1) Atlanta and Philly from last year’s playoffs. Both used youth and athleticism to extend
older, veteran teams, one of which was the eventual champion. We’ve got youth and athleticism in spades, and I dare say we’re better than both those teams were last year.

2) When I think of first-round playoff exits, I think of teams who have just enough talent to make it, but everybody knows they can’t win 4 out of 7 games because of one reason or another. With our team it’s a little different. We’ve got talent oozing out our arses, we just need some experience to put it together. Who’s to say it couldn’t all come together for a few games in April/May?

3) I hear you on Plans A, B, and C. But I think we’ve got a bit of a wildcard in Brandon Roy. Might even be a Draw Four wildcard. He has shown glimpses of being nigh unstoppable when he wants to (end of Atlanta game last year). And with the rest of the team getting even better around him (Rudy, Oden, Aldridge, etc.) it will make it that much harder for other teams to key on Brandon, which spells t-r-o-u-b-l-e for other teams if you ask me.

But, like I said, these things give me HOPE that we COULD upset somebody (L*kers, L*kers, L*kers) … they do not bring me to the point of EXPECTING we will upset someone.

Blazers have tons of both but probably won´t have time enough to practice those plans A, B, C, D. and to learn them well enough to contend in playoffs. That´s a serious concern. On the other hand, sometimes people find a plan that nobody can defend for a while and that´s easier with great players. Time to check how good our players are.

Brandon Roy will lead us to the promise land.

Miami in 2006 (whenever they won)
Boston last year
Utah when the made it to the conference finals with Dwill in his first or 2nd year

We’ve seen teams that have played together for a long time overcome supposedly better teams that are just thrown together, as in the 8 previous years in International ball.

So many teams seem manufactured. Maybe that’s not the best way to say it, but there are so many examples just in the last few years where a team goes from an also ran to a contender with just one thing changing. I don’t see how that’s much different than the Blazers adding Oden, Rudy, Bayless, Batum (I wouldn’t have included him a week ago)

Boston is an obvious example, but they did bring in some all stars. Yet none of them really had that much playoff experience. Do 1st round exists count? Allen had one good run I suppose (if memory serves me). As a team though, they didn’t really have anything. They got a lot of breaks, and some veteran bandwagoners and it all worked out.

Miami pulls in Shaq and they win a ring.

Andrew Bynum bursts onto the scene and people in LA are buying tickets to the finals, you know, to show to their friends, not to actually go. That doesn’t work out until they miraculously end up with Pau Gasol, a guy who could never get out of the first round and they make the finals.

Golden State as the 8th seed can run and gun it’s way past the then reigning West Finals champion Dallas Mavericks.

Sure those teams have some different circumstances, hall of fame coaches and players, for example, but no one ever talks about playoff tested veteran individuals. It’s the team that wins. I’m just wondering how teams that add in new players, who have to learn new systems and the tendencies of new teammates are able to win in the playoffs but we can only hope. I guess I don’t think youth is that big of a disadvantage in light of the talent and chemistry we have.

Actually, we probably come closer to last year’s Hornets than any of those teams. Chris Paul has an MVP year and David West is an All Star and they are one game away from making the West finals. Why can’t Portland do that? We have a bench that the Hornets can only dream of.

Furthermore, the only teams that I would label veteran, playoff tested teams are the Pistons and the Spurs, maybe the Celtics now. Tons of playoff experience there. Yet they fell to teams with less experience. I’d like to think that our talent will trump experience.

I wouldn’t bet that the Blazers cinderella themselves deep into the playoffs, but I think the talent and intangibles are there to upset veteran teams.

End unintelligible rant.

the even jordan needed pippen almost breaks down when you think of who lebron james needed. varajeao? zydrunas? booby? he went to win the East with 1 star…granted it was a weak conference :)

I don’t think the team get a top four seed (the Western Conference is incredible right now) but I can easily see them making a playoff run from a lower spot (Blazers match up well with most teams).

Playoff experience is another way of saying – poise/composure, decision making, physicality and a couple of other things (it’s early brain, it’s working full steam yet) – all of which the Blazers have in spades.

The team gets a huge advantage from two things

• Brandon Roy playing the two guard position. Roy’s ability to play the point and run the offense at a level equal to most high quality point guards gives the Blazers two players (the actual point – Blake) on the floor who can direct and control the offense. This gives the Blazers a huge advantage in terms of executing their offense.
• Greg Oden and Aldridge. They’re one of the best big man combinations in the league already. They have good depth behind them too. They’ll ensure that the team doesn’t get smacked around in the paint like it did at times last year (Houston, Suns amongst many others). They’ll ensure this team is ultra competitive in the paint, on the backboards, defensively, and get you some easy baskets. Also the attention they’ll force the opposition to pay will be huge.

This isn’t a typical young team. They shouldn’t be stereotyped as such …. and the expectations should change with that.

We all know they have a fantastic future ahead of them and whether they win or lose this season won’t change …. the patience and acceptance from fans will be there. There’s no need to dial down the expectations, the expectations should be high because the quality of this team demands it.

All good points Dave.

We have:

Roy, I’ll assume he is the #1 option at this point.

Aldridge, I’ll assume the #2 option.

Oden, by the end of the year I’d assume one of the most dominant paint centers in the league.

Rudy, to take over where Roy left off, after all he’s not really a rookie is he?

That’’s 4 options. Not counting our bench which I would lump together as a viable 5th option. I remember last year there were several games where the white unit came in and smoked.

Who’s to say we don’t take a few token players and the RLEC for a vet with playoff experience like a Tayshaun Prince or such? Would that be enough to give the locker room that needed experience on how to approach a playoff run? My money says KP is waiting to see what we really need as a final piece to get us there, kinda of a hole stop when the dam starts to leak.

Perhaps I’m daydreaming, but I think we would demolish Utah in the Playoffs, we killed them last year in the regular season before we added Oden and Rudy this year. Last year we were killed when Joel was not in the game, this year Joel’s our weak link at center, something teams would die for. Last year I think a lot of teams approach was to go at Joel and get him into foul trouble so they could get in the paint. Not so this year. The path to the paint must go through Oden, and by the All-Star break, I expect that will not be an easy task.

I say give us Utah in the first round and let other teams watch and quiver. I don’t think anyone will want to see us in the playoffs at all.

Just my nickel’s worth.

and i think some of you missed Dave’s point.

‘77 blazers are a perfect example of the EXCEPTION to the rule. It’s not a black and white rule. It’s about the law of averages. The Spurs don’t win a championship every year, but they win it every other year because they’ve built a team that even when things go wrong, they have answers. They’ve had injuries, they’ve played against fast paced and slow paced teams, and on average, they come out on top. If too many things go wrong, they’re back again next year with all those same answers and a few new mixes (Brent Barry as an example)

This years blazers could very well burst out and be playing for a championship. They’ll also be playing against teams that have been doing it for a long time. The hornets fell to the spurs. Why? Because teh spurs had the answers and experience. That could very well be us next year.

We could get in on raw talent and chemistry (in to the championships), and i"ve purchased Season tickets “just in case”, that said there’s a lot that has to go right for us to do that.

‘78 blazers, Walton goes down and the amazing winning streaks they had going on ended. The ’78 Blazers had no other answer. The ’77 blazers had everyone healthy and everything right for one incredible year. I believe that’s the point Dave is making.

Dallas is a perfect example of that point. An amazing winning season, a fairly 1 / 2 dimensional team… and they got knocked out by a team that didn’t even make the play-offs the year after. One year they made the championships and they haven’t been back since.

Really like the interesting investigation into the kinds of public postures different teams make and what that translates into. Very good.

I’m wondering about your three year predictions.

Are your predictions based on the Blazers keeping their current personnel or have you factored in certain changes?

when no one will be able to stop our Plan A? Once this team comes together and hits its stride, it will crush everything in its path like a top-fuel steamroller.

The differences between playoff basketball and regular season basketball are significant, but very overrated. Teams like the Hornets who burst on the scene tend to do just fine in the playoffs— they were a break or two away from being in the Western finals. Boston hadn’t played a playoff series together before last year.

When the Blazers break-through and grab a top 4 seed, they’ll be fine, even without “experience.” I don’t know if that will be this year, next year or in two years, but I don’t worry about lack of experience.

I agree with the point about the top teams having a different mindset than the Blazers right now and how that’s an advantage… but I don’t think its as big as Dave makes it sound.

So there!

Plan A would be pound inside to Oden and Aldridge with kick-outs to open shooters. Get them in foul trouble and win that way.

Plan B would be win a defensive battle with scores in the high 80s or low 90s. This team can do that…

Plan C would be penetration with Roy, Bayless, Fernandez, Rodriguez.

Plan D would be rain the treys.

This team is so versatile and talented they might just be able to break out about 10 ways to win. More importantly, they have a defense that will stifle teams quite often.

Against the Kings they just crippled them for the third quarter (a quarter that last year was the Achilles heel for Portland).

Against Golden State they played defense until the 4th quarter when they rolled out almost exclusively people who won’t play meaning ful minutes: they had a 10-7 fast break point advantage entering the 4th quarter. Sure, GS didn’t have Ellis and it is pre-season…but it is still the Warriors.

Batum manned up and showed he can be a shut-down wing defender if needed, we all know what Roy did to Joe Johnson last year, Webster is better than advertised, and Oden, Przybilla and Aldridge are as good an interior defender trio as you will find.

We will find out within the first 10 games where Portland is at but I am with Coach McMillan. He said (on Barrett’s blog) the “We are young” thing was “last year or the year before”. Portland plain and simple has more talent than essentially any other team in the League. I would say that, barring a disastrous start they can’t recover from, this team should at the minimum win a playoff series.

I know it is aggressive, but I think that, as constitued, they are better than the Jazz, Spurs, or even L*kers. Of course, we don’t have K*be…and that might be the difference.

Thanks for bringing back from the homersphere (somewhere way beyond the troposphere “aka reality”) – it’s tough to put things into perspective when you are so jacked up for your team you can’t see straight – good post.

I was just about to submit my 10 page essay proving without a shadow of a doubt that this would be the first of 10 championships in as many years…but now it will just look like I’m bickering, so I won’t do it. Most of the pages were pictures of Blazer dancers anyway.

I’d say must of us are homers really. Otherwise, we wouldn’t religiously check BE everyday. ALL DAY. Sure we all love the NBA, but the Blazers are why most of us are here.
Being a contender in the west in 2 years sounds fair. With the elite teams getting somewhat older and slower and this young group just going to get better, this seems relatively realistic.

Like a lot of people in this thread I am having a hard time understanding in concrete terms what you mean by plan A, B and C.

Care to elucidate?

I agree with the rest, as I understand it.

this team has fewer questions than even the top teams you mentioned. The main questions stem from the fact that we’ve never seen this team actually gain a top seed (or even make the playoffs for that matter ) whereas the other four teams have in the past. But that does not necessarily equate to a question, because it’s pretty obvious from a head-to-head matchup with any of those teams that the Blazers are right there in terms of talent and ability.

The one valid question this team has is injuries, and don’t think that those other teams have worries about that too. The Blazers are deeper than most of those teams too which tends to offset the injury worry a bit.

and will play Houston in the first round playoffs and lose 2-4 this year.
Next year they might get to semis and so on

Is that I expect the Blazers to make the playoffs but not win it all. I’m not going to be happy when the get knocked out. The second it happens, I’m writing a “Fire Kevin Pritchard” fanpost.