FanShot

Acker: Jon Barry Wrong In Roy / Foye Analysis

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Mike Acker of RipCityProject.com tore apart ESPN's broadcast of Friday night's game between the Portland Trail Blazers and Los Angeles Clippers, going after analyst Jon Barry in particular. ------------------------------------- Like I said I would, I decided to watch the ESPN broadcast Friday night. I might have to change that policy for the future. For one thing, I know I missed what I’m sure was some pretty top-notch homerism during the J.J. Hickson Highlight Hour and the No Call On Wesley Matthews. But it wasn’t homer announcers this time that made me almost put my foot through the television. For that we have Jon Barry. Because a national audience doesn’t watch Blazer games every day or know everything there is to know about this team (like the locals do), ESPN brought it upon themselves to deconstruct what happened to the franchise this season to turn them from sleeper favorite in January to lottery-bound in March. They started with Brandon Roy. Seeing the montage of failure was bad enough. What followed was emotionally and physically unpleasant to the point that I felt somebody needed a switch kick in the throat. Jon Barry, the brother of my favorite basketball player EVER, went on a run about Brandon, going as far as to say that Minnesota made the right call in trading Brandon on draft day for Randy Foye. Here’s my problem with all that nonsense. Of course it’s not true, for starters. You take Brandon Roy over Randy Foye every day of the week from now until the sun goes supernova and the earth ceases to exist. But since Brandon’s career is over and Foye’s isn’t, it appears to the lay person that Foye is a better long-term pick than Roy. Answer this question Jon Barry, what kind of impact did Randy Foye have on the team that he ended up playing for as a rookie? Sure Foye will play for a decade or more. He might even be a role player on a good team at some point in his career. He may even finish with better numbers than Brandon in some categories. But saying on national TV that Portland messed up by not being vigilant with the knee related red flags that everybody knew existed with Brandon is revisionist history, it’s ignorant, it’s wrong, and it should get you fired. It’s also the type of thing that might make people forget that almost nobody is more responsible for the rebirth of one of the most successful franchises in all of professional sports than Brandon Roy. I would say Portland made the right choice. ------------------------------------- -- Ben Golliver | benjamin.golliver@gmail.com | Twitter