How Oden, Fernandez, and Bayless fit in would be an obvious one. Rodriguez’ deal is pretty much sealed, wouldn’t you say?

compared to other WC teams. Many of those playoff teams are in win-now mode and have acquired aging players more inclined towards injuries that take them out of play for 10-20 game stretches. Maybe not so much this season, but the next 2-3 seasons for sure. Kidd, Shaq, Duncan, and don’t forget the perennial TMac and Yao injuries…if one of those guys misses significant games, they have no one to step in and fill their shoes (although Houston has some pretty good depth), whereas the Blazers have depth at every position except maybe PG – and that may be solved, as Dave has hinted, at the end of this season.

A team’s chances of winning are inversely proportional to the number of “ifs” you have to use when talking about them.

A team’s chances of winning don’t exist in a vacuum. They also depend on what’s going on with their competitors. Last season’s Golden State Warriors can tell you about that. So can the 1994-95 Houston Rockets.

I am definitely picking up what you are throwing down Dave.

But the problem is perception.

Everyone wants to make predictions, and those predictions are going to be judged against the predictions each poster already has. Say the reader is reading a post where it says the Blazers are an 8 seed, and he thinks they are going to be a 2 seed: the poster is suddenly guilty of Pessimism.

Or the poster says they’re going to be a 4 seed and the reader doesn’t think they are going to make the playoffs at all: the poster is suddenly guilty of Homerism.

I mean even as I was reading your post I was mentally judging what you were saying against my own predictions, and unless you hold the speaker above fallibility, everyone else is doing the same thing. From reading your own predictions the one thing that jumped out at me is that it is practically impossible for anyone to say with any degree of certainty that in 3-4 years down the road the Blazers will not have to worry about Talent. We can say that with a few years of maturation we will be better, and I think that is about where it lies.

Its the problem with having a fan site, every bodies’ opinions are based on the same information, and the differences of opinion are all in how people interpret it. Giving yourself or the poster a label is unhelpful, and at this point (the off-season) nobody is getting any new information and all of the judgments are opinions.

Man, you really had to reach with those “questions” surrounding this team. They all look like the answers will be positive if not amazing. Oden will either be better than Joel Przybilla, or he’ll be a great rookie back up. My guess is he’ll be a lot better than Joel Przybilla. Regardless, we’ll now have a team with two legit 7 foot shot blocking centers instead of just one. This will give LaMarcus and Channing the opportunity to focus exclusively on their natural positions. Rudy and Bayless are pure gravy players. If they’re great, they’ll be improvements on people like Martell, James Jones, and Jarrett Jack. If they suck, they’ll sit on the bench and we’ve still got good players in their position. The point guard “question” is really just a problem of fan perception. The NBA Finals I saw was not Chris Paul vs Chauncey Billups. It was Rajon Rondo beating Derek Fisher. Fanboys have this fantasy obsession with point guards because it’s the position they can most relate to. But in the real world, the best point guards in the league are playing on non-Championship teams and the championship teams are playing with non-All Star points. Every single player on our team (Raef excepted) is either in his prime or years away from it. Nobody is on their last legs or in the twilight of their career. We’ve got some concerns about injuries, but aside from Greg, nothing much more than other teams. And we did pretty good with zero % of Greg for 100% of last year. If we get 80% of Greg for 50% of next season, that’s still an improvement.

That is were the coaching staff is highly important: distributing minutes so that everybody feels valued; not yanking players out who made one mistake, but not giving players not fighting or having an off-night too much time on the field either (Dallas had this problem often last year); developing the right plays, and calling them when it’s appropriate (Phoenix against San Antonio in playoff OT anyone?); etc. I have trust in our coaching staff to do this and the players to execute what they are supposed to do (e.g. very good production after timeouts in recent years when plays could be discussed), but it’s still a big question mark with a young team that undoubtedly has the required talent.

The L@kers could have won even more titles with all the talent they had at hand in the last decade, but at times they just didn’t play well together, despite arguably having the best playoff coach in the league (03-04, Boston series). Or little things can make all the difference: Phoenix had the best talent one year, and was stopped by getting two of their main guys ejected for stupidly leaving the bench. Dallas was stopped by questionable foul calls that prevented them from going up 3-1 in the finals, turning the series around. And so on.

Or an example from another sport: Spain – or a lot of South American nations for that matter – in soccer (yeah, boo me if you want). They regularly had the most talented teams with big stars, but just as regularly didn’t play well together and getting easily frustrated. This year they won the European championship, albeit leaving a few of their biggest names at home and trusting a younger generation of players who played well together. In the previous installment, Greece surprisingly won despite clearly not having the best team, but executing their strategy very well. Yeah, in soccer luck / coincidence is more important than is basketball as one situation can completely change the game. But still, sometimes talent wins it all, sometimes it just doesn’t play well together.

Hopefully, we have young talent that does play well together.
So here is my prediction for this year as the west stands now: We reach the playoffs. Wohoo, I’m an optimist. But in the first round we meet LAL. And lose the series, despite putting on a good fight. Now, am I a pessimist?

enter this past season with probably the most questions of any team in the league? Now that was probably because they had the biggest media spotlight on them but everyone could see that it was a gamble to bring that team together. On paper, you didn’t know what you were going to get out of that roster outside of the big 3 (although I could hear arguments for James Posey). Boston fans (like Blazer fans now) were hoping/wishing/praying that Eddie House would become a sparkplug off the bench, that Perkins would develop into a solid center, that (the biggest leap of faith) that Rajon Rondo could jump 3 years of progress and become a good pg, that Ray Allen’s ankles would hold up, that they would get anything out of “projects” Glen Davis and Leon Powe, and most importantly, that Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and to a lesser extent, Ray Allen could coexist. And not just coexist but win a championship because they just sold their future for the now. The spurs for all their “dependability” have never won 2 championships in a row although they have been a very good and consistent team. And injuries, although impossible to predict, can and do change the outcome of your season. No team in the league is capable of overcoming the loss of their best player for an extended period of time, so although I agree that “ups and downs” shouldn’t have an overall effect on an established team, injury can derail championship hopes and dreams…No matter how good our team becomes, our potential rests on Oden’s knee.