As promised yesterday (but not gotten to until today because I had some double-checking to do) we have three announcements regarding Blazersedge Night at the Garden on December 27^th vs. the Toronto Raptors.

The first announcement is that we have sold out our allotment of tickets for the night.  Well done all!  It’s going to be a fantastic night.

Secondly, for those who are wondering, we are not going to have a before or after meet and greet (at least not an official one) this time.  The proximity to Christmas and resulting travel hassles make it dicey enough as it is.  However I will officially announce now that we are going to gather at some point after the New Year at the world-famous Agency downtown.  We’re going to pick a road game and watch it together on TV.  We’ll set an official date on that in a few weeks.  Stay tuned.

Here’s the third and most important announcement.

Though we have sold out our allotment of tickets the Blazers have opened up another section for us, containing about 50 seats.  Although we could probably sell those to late-arriving Blazersedgers, that’s not the purpose.  Instead we are going to donate these seats to kids around the area who couldn’t otherwise attend a game because of their family or financial situation.  This is similar to what we did last year, when we sent some forty-odd kids.  Anyone who was there that night knows that they had a great time.  This year we have more seats and can send more kids.

The seat price for this section is the same as for our other section:  $22 per seat.  To send a kid all you have to do is contact Lisa Swan at lisa.swan@trailblazers.com or (503) 963-3966.  You can pay in the usual ways.  Make sure to tell her the tickets are for charity or for the kids so she doesn’t mail them to you!  We’ll make sure the tickets get where they’re going once they’re all sold.

To help the proceedings, and to prove the power of the blogosphere, I’d like to make a special offer to my fellow NBA bloggers out there.  We will feature any NBA blog that purchases three or more tickets for these kids on the main page of Blazersedge for a week.  I don’t mean just a simple link either.  I mean we will talk about, evaluate, and interact with whatever you do for five straight days, Monday through Friday.  Send three or more kids to a game, write solidly for a week, and you could have readership for life.

Whether it’s fellow bloggers, people buying blocks of ten, or just individuals chipping in one seat at a time, I would love to hear from Lisa that the tickets for the kids have sold like hotcakes.  This is a way to kindle in another generation that fire of Blazer/NBA fandom that we’ve all caught together. 

When things aren’t going great in your life small, silly things like basketball sometimes take on great meaning.  Sometimes that’s enough meaning to get you through the hard times.  I would bet most of us have experienced that at one time or another.  These kids deserve that chance too.  That’s why I hope you’ll be a part of this. 

lisa.swan@trailblazers.com   (503) 963-3966

--Dave (blazersub@yahoo.com)