Henry Abbott on the Blazers

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Consider one of Portland's trade deadline trades.

Perhaps the scarcest resource in sports is a useful NBA center. They just don't make a lot of seven-footers with elite athleticism. Marcus Camby is one of them. The Blazers traded Camby and his expiring contract for two players with expiring contracts who have never produced meaningfully and are virtual locks to be cut (Hasheem Thabeet and Jonny Flynn) and a poor-quality second-round pick.

Consider, also, that the two teams involved -- the Blazers and the Rockets -- have been locked in mortal combat for playoff positioning for half a decade or so.

If Portland wants cap space for next summer, simply keeping Camby would have done the trick. Gifting him needlessly to a rival, though, for the kind of pick that last year became ... Jon Diebler ... What is the point?

Of course, we all know the point. The Blazers are going in the tank, and this helps in the organizational mission to become a very, very bad team. You simply don't play wily veterans like Camby on teams like the Blazers who are playing to lose. It's a blemish on the venerable Camby's reputation, it doesn't serve the team's goals anyway, and if he gets hurt logging waste-of-time minutes it's the kind of NBA karma you might never escape. Bring on Thabeet.

Gerald Wallace is out, too, in what everyone agrees is a great trade. He's the kind of player any team would want, but the whole goal of rebuilding through the draft is getting the kind of draft pick only really bad teams like the Nets have. That was one of the best trades of the day.

Similarly, Nate McMillan is a real deal NBA professional who buttons his shirt all the way up, gets bossy in timeouts and coaches games with the conviction it's best to win them. So he's out too, whether out of mercy, respect, or acknowledgement that the love affair was over. Bring on Kaleb Canales, whom everybody in the organization loves, but some still refer to as "the video guy." You can't ask a guy like McMillan to captain a leaky ship like this. He's the kind of guy who will have a W-L record after his name until the day he dies.

Here's the crazy thing about this: As a Blazer fan, I think this loser of a strategy is a winner. I'm only sad they didn't go further. The team was not on a path to win a title. My conviction is that LaMarcus Aldridge should be traded, too. As a talented big-man All-Star in his prime he'll hurt the lottery positioning. But he might fetch some splendid cap space and picks.

We are conditioned to embrace this kind of strategy as sports fans. But it plays very poorly to people who buy tickets, and even worse in the world of sports-as-inspirational-metaphor-for-real-life.

How does this part of the sports world translate to our daily lives?

When my team was fighting like crazy every darned night, that felt a little like going to work and giving it my best even if it didn't always end well.

Ditching the good players and the coach, though ... that feels more like trumping up an injury to collect disability.

Whatever it is, it's not even one little bit scrappy.

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Meanwhile, consider the Rockets. They have dealt with all kinds of injuries to Yao Ming and many others. But have made trade after trade, year after year, just trying to win a few more games, and to get a tiny bit better. They have always been competing and scrapping, and by the looks of things always will be. And do you know what's sad? In the NBA, teams almost never progress from pretty good, like the Rockets and Blazers have been, to excellent. It's the jump we allege every team can make, but it's one of the least likely in sports.

So remember this Camby trade, and watch the Rockets and Blazers from here forward. They're racing to be the first to make it back to the Finals. One of them is trying to win by competing hard every night, the other is trying something that nobody in their right mind would want to watch.

As much as I appreciate the strategy in Portland, as a fan of competition, I wish I could support a league that inspired 30 teams to approach things like Houston.

http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop

 

Damn tlong, I thought for sure you would make a crack about the Ducks and their cap space.

 

Wheels does an excellent job there.