but reading about the Blazers has become very boring and frustrating.  Not much value added to the experience of following the team, IMO.  But this is sort of a new development for me.  I very much enjoyed the extensive coverage during the rebuilding years.  The Blazers would struggle and we'd learn something about the players.  Fun to analyze and compare notes.  They would exceed expectations and it would create a fun buzz.  Even some of the non-basketball stuff was interesting, the fake GM stuff, draft analyses, post-hoc reviews of the draft or trades, etc.  (Never could get into the really non-basketball coverage of the Blazers, like what Canzano typically covers -- human interest stories, nefarious businessmen, bad actors, public image 'scandals' -- but that's a special case.)  Now things have changed a lot.  I still enjoy the games as much as before, maybe even more.  It's a mature team, head and shoulders better than what we've had in the past decade.  Solid execution (generally) on both ends of the floor.  Lost a few close ones, but they were really fun games to watch.  Been a great year for basketball here in PDX, if a bit of a grind because of the schedule.  Team's really got the chance to be something special, which is fun to plug into.  The media coverage of it?  Not so much.  National media doesn't really watch the Blazers (other than maybe John Hollinger), hence any and all opinions about them feel relatively uninformed; local media is bending over backwards to squeeze some drama out of the season beyond X's and O's, and failing; and the blogosphere is generally filled with folks throwing their typical hissy fits about this or that.  My god, Roy has chronic knee issues, who knew?  (um, anybody who's been following the team.)   I think this team is going through that transition that makes watching the games a lot of fun, but reading about them not much fun.  This is likely the sign of a solid, mature roster and a media that just doesn't spend much time on X's and O's, which is what's really interesting these days.  I know, I know, nobody's twisting my arm, guess I'll just tune out.