FanPost

The School for Robinsons.


One of the greatest stories of this summer was the Blazers trading for the Rocket Thomas Earl Robinson, who´s now playing for his third team in two seasons. He´s one of those players early discarded by the teams that drafted them, whom other teams are willing to trade for, hoping it was just a bad fit or something, so perhaps they can get a diamond out of another team´s wrong judgement or bad circumstances.

Robinson has been our second unit PF so far ever since, not counting the few "Meyers games in between" exception, since Meyers has shown to be as green as Sergio Rodriguez when he came into the league and as good as defender. Being a NO´s player and having committed some resources to get him, seems to be a priority to develop this guy, who also was the 5th pick in his draft.

Now, after 4 months of Blazers basketball, I´m afraid they are taking a step from Robinson´s development to the Crusoe experiment, which I think should be delayed for the summer, where he can work alone with his coaches. Do the Blazers think he will be better having twenty thousand leagues of basketball under his belt? Because in my humble opinion he´s looking on the court like a man on a misterious lost island. And his teammates don´t seem to be in search of the castaways.

I think there´re three main classes of backup PFs in this league: the strech four, the energy guy and the mid range shooter. I didn´t expect TRob to be the master of the world, but I did expect him to find his niche already this season as a kind of poor man´s Manimal, which would have been good enough for me. But he´s becoming just a poor man among the usual NBA cannibals. He still can become a good energy guy, and I think he will be with time, but now it´s just not that time. The Blazers are having an nba extraordinary journey so far, but they could see themselves around the world in eighty days from now if they don´t stablish soon a decent bench rotation (my hopes are now in CJ, what a stud).

Lately Thomas´s play is getting worse each game. At this point there´s no reason for giving him another five weeks in a Baloon, because he´s not going suddenly from the Earth to the Moon. He will be thrown down to Earth quickly instead, starting a painful journey to its center, where his confidence will get buried for long.

Or maybe that chance which now seems lost may present itself at the last moment. You know what they say, while there is life there is hope.