Jan 19th vs Milwaukee Gametime 7 pm Pacific Time CSN With a dissapointing 2 and 2 record for their East Coast Road trip the Blazers return to Portland to take on the Milwaukee Bucks. The Bucks will be playing without Center Andrew Bogut, who is having back spasms and will miss all three games of the Bucks west coast road trip.This is our first match with Milwaukee this year, and if you haven't seen this years Bucks in action, you click here you can get a look at NBA TVs preseason look at this years Milwaukee team by clicking here. Once again the Blazers take to the hardwood without the services of Steve Blake. Steve Blake could be sidelined up to a month, longer than originally expected, with a right shoulder injury. Blake separated his shoulder in Wednesday's loss to Philadelphia. The team originally said he'd be out 7 to 10 days, but the prognosis changed to 2 to 4 weeks after Blake was examined Saturday in Portland, Ore."With a sprained shoulder like that, 4 weeks is probably the norm," coach Nate McMillan said. The good news for the many fans of Jerryd Bayless is that the Blake injury has created more playing time for the rookie. And he has responded. "I treat basketball like the love of my life," the Trail Blazers rookie said. And he responded to his newfound opportunity with a breakout performance, when he led the Blazers with a career-high 23 points in a 105-99 win at New Jersey. The young rookie also turned in a solid performance in Saturday nights loss to Charlotte. He scored 14 points, shot 6-9 from the field in 32 minutes of PT. In other Blazer news, now that Darius Miles has finally played his tenth game I thought we could now all breathe a sigh of relief that the drama was over. But no. Yahoo sportswriter Adrian Wojnarowski continues to stir the pot by trashing Portland GM Kevin Pritchard in his most recent article. He says this mess has exposed Kevin. That he wanted to be the star in the good times in Portland..... He started to believe his own clippings, his own mythology, and he thought he could get away with anything. From the start, Pritchard stumbled into the one rabid NBA market where a general manager can aspire to celebrity. Never did he do much but furiously feed the rush to declare him a genius. He bragged of draining three cell-phone batteries a day. He wanted everyone to believe that he worked harder and longer and smarter. Maybe he thought it all portrayed a confidence, but it mostly masked an insecurity. I'm not sure what Wojnarowskis motives are, but he certainly has an agenda of doing whatever he can to trash our GMs good name. Not sure if Jeff Wechsler stuffed some money in his pocket or what, but his attack on KP is not only vicious, but uncalled for. He finishes his article by gloating over how now the Jailblazers in Portland are wearing suits, and Portlands capspace has vanished. Wojnarowski clearly had a headline in mind, before he wrote that article. So he filled in the blanks in his mental template and constructed a trashy little piece about KP. Where he really blew it was at the end of the piece. If he'd had his thinking cap on and had done his research he wouldn't be making comments about our capspace vanishing. The good folks over at Blazers Edge have studied the current implications of adding MIles numbers back into our payroll. Sure, it hurts. But if you look at the numbers we still have a fair amount of flexibility left. Even with Miles' back on our books for 2009-10, we can still get far enough under the cap to sign a max player or two players worth of 8-9 million dollar contracts each. Were we to want to, we can even extend a lot of our cap room into 2010 and try and be a player for the 2nd tier free agent talent that season (which there is a lot of,) or if Joel doesn't exercise, even get far enough under for a near-max contract. Alternatively (or even additonally) in either year, we can be a salary dump for other teams, taking back a huge contract (presumably a very good player) in exchange for much smaller contracts (read younger players with potential). How valuable might that be as teams try and get in on the 2010 sweepstakes? Put that in your pipe and smoke it Mr. Yahoo Sports. We will still be able to get whatever players we want to add to our team. If you click on that link you can see the charts from Storyteller that break down the numbers for the next couple seasons. Projected starters Portland Trailblazers Sergio Rodriguez -PG Brandon Roy-SG Nic Batum-SF LaMarcus Aldridge-PF Greg Oden-Center Projected starters Milwaukee Bucks Luke Ridnour-PG Michael Redd-SG Luc Richard Mbah a Moute-PF Richard Jefferson-SF Dan Gadzuric-Center If you wish, you may CLICK HERE, for a chance to win a free Portland Trailblazer Jersey, otherwise just ignore.
I've yet to see a good reason for Sergio starting with the first unit and Bayless coming off the bench.
2-2 isn't that disappointing on the road. Sixers are on a win streak and the Bobcats are on the rise. Having both Webster and Blake out leaves our roster very thin. We now start two rookies, three third year players, and then ask two more rookies to carry a lot of the load off the bench. That is INSANE. And to still be 24-16 is very impressive. Very impressive. This team is on track to probably win 45-50 games and considering the injuries to Blake and Webster (two starters) and the underwhelming play of Oden, that's a pretty great improvement. I forgot to mention that we lost Roy and Rudy for a bit of time there too.
