That was a strange and hilarious read. Proof that a puff piece can be made even in the darkest of days. Enlightening!
Meh, you can be forgiven for being optimistic back then. Telfair did show signs of being special, Darius Miles before his knee injuries and losing interest in working hard was a game-changing player, and Zach... well... we all fell for that.
Well, I remember clearly, it was the training camp out in McMinnville. It was Nate's first training camp and we had a healthy Miles, Zach was fresh off knee surgery, and Bassy was coming into his second season. That was my last year covering the team. They actually looked pretty decent in training camp, but Miles was injured that season and Bass didn't adjust well to Nate's style.
How did YOU get a job covering the team? Hope it was better then the BS you toss around here! .............where is the green font button?
Well he didn't really play his rookie season until Cheeks was fired and Pritchard took over towards the end of the season. Damon was still here and it wasn't until KP was made the coach that he started playing the young guys like Khryapa and Telfair. Looking back at the schedule, he didn't get consistent minutes until February of that season.
You would have loved me back then. I was the only guy writing positive things about the team. This was before Blazers Edge, this was before the Oregonian had much online content, and it was long before the Blazers had anything on their website. It was basically me and Hoopsworld against Quick, Canzano, and the Oregonian. It was an epic battle to stem the tide of negative crap coming from the O.
My brother was the Blazers writer on Hoopsworld before Nate. It was a problem that he lived in seattle though and didn't have time to cover the team.
Of course, the O was right about on-court play. Those teams were terrible and, setting aside Zach Randolph, lacking much legit NBA talent Ed O.
Well, I left right after Nate took power. I started out when we still had Sheed and Bonzi. I barely missed out on Pip. I wish I could have covered the team when Pip was still here. The team wasn't THAT bad, and probably would have made the playoffs if they hadn't moved Sheed. But the O wasn't even writing about the on-court play. It seemed like every article started out, "The Blazers lost last night.... and Zach Randolph got pulled over.... yadda yadda yadda."
I hated reading the articles about the games back then. They were never really facts about the games, but were seemingly always about Jason Quick's agenda and whatever melodrama he wanted to portray.
Exactly... it seemed like there was very little content about the actual gameplay, and mostly just his opinions and biases about the off-court problems that surrounded the team.
He looked "good" while being on a team lost 21 out of 22 games, or something ridiculously similar to those numbers. Still, I like your optimism!
The team was losing by double-digits almost every single game. WTF was he going to write about? An 8-2 run in the 3rd quarter that pulled the team within 15? Watching games back then was self-torture. On most nights, you knew they had no chance to win, and were happy if it was close at half time. Quick had to sell papers ... plus, it's not like the off-court stuff was libelous.
