The game preview and gameday thread will be posted along before noon, but I wanted to take a moment this morning to acknowledge a couple of folks over at Oregonlive. Everybody here knows (and probably visits) Casey Holdahl's Blazer Blog and Jason Quick + Mike Tokito's Behind the Blazer Beat. But two other sports-type blogs are under-acknowledged and probably not visited as much as they deserve.
The first is Helen Jung's fine, fine Playbooks and Profits. Ms. (oops! alas, now Mrs.) Jung talks some Blazers, even more NBA, and other sports in general from a business perspective, which is often more influential than one likes to imagine. In the last few days she's logged entries on LeBron, Seattle voting, and Nike. She also, if you recall, took the point in much of this summer's "Deal or No Deal" Blazer drama. Lest we forget, those issues are not far beneath the surface and when they inevitably bubble to the top of the pot again we'll be glad Helen Jung is there keeping us updated.
The second is Ryan White's Tailgate blog. Ryan's style is hard to describe, other than to say he's very, very entertaining. He also covers the Blazers with passion among his other topics. He does live, line-by-line updates from the home games, which might be a good window for folks to have open while you're commenting in our gameday threads here.
Though both Ryan and Helen do excellent work, neither seem to have an abundance of comments. Much like Puff the Magic Dragon, bloggers tend to fade when they're not demonstrably believed in. Trust me, we wouldn't want either of these folks to sadly slip back to their caves. If you get the chance today, check out their work and leave a comment. Heck, if you want tell them Dave sent you.
--Dave (blazersub@yahoo.com)