The Jailblazers in Retrospect: It was never about character, it was about losing.

I think its fairly evident, given the upheaval of Portland Fans by a bad string of games and bleak future.

Winning with assholes and thugs > Losing with nice guys

 

It wasn't that way for me. I was ashamed of the Jail Blazers. To each his own, however.

 

I didn't care about the character to be honest. I just want to win. These "good character" stories and the "fan pledge" the organization shoves down our throats make me sick. Well, I don't mind them doing good in the community, but that's secondary to winning.

 

Been saying that since the beginning. But with these guys, we've won more than lost, so I don't think it's entirely fair to label their tenure with the Blazers as "losing."

 

The bottom line is that it's always about winning or losing.

But when adversity hit that batch of knuckleheads their shitty character showed through and they spiraled down that much quicker and it made it impossible to root for them -- I wanted them to fail towards the end.

The real issue is that being a winner is more than just being talented or physically gifted, there's a mentality that goes along with it that is willing to sacrifice and shut out distractions and the teams during that period lacked enough players with a winning mentality.

The problem with this current team isn't that they are full of nice guys, it's that they are mostly "nice guys" with a lot of balky knees. No matter how nice somebody is, if their body fails them, there's no compensating for that.

 

We have a bunch of nice guys which, at one time, gave us all great hope. Unfortunately:

* One is suddenly and prematurely past his prime and hasn't adapted
* A couple are nice but need to have more "meanness" or aggressiveness (too nice/passive)
* One sees the doctor more than some of us see our wife/husband or children
* A coach who has consistently shown a remarkable inability to adapt (that's my plan & I'm sticking with it)

My vote is to bench Roy except for at most 20 min per game and essentially make this Miller's team. Miller, Wes, Batum, LMA & Camby or Joel as the starting group with a very thin bench. Still give plenty of time to Armon/Mills to let them fight out who deserves the backup role (if either really takes charge and says "it should obviously be me" or if we get into another Jack/Telfair/Blake scenario).

I have no plans on the Blazers being in the playoffs this year. They are a broken team with virtually no reasonably valuable assets with which to work.

Gramps...

 

The last few years the Blazers were on par with those jailblazer days -- around 52-55 wins per season.

However, those jailblazers didn't get smashed in the first round so easily as the Roy-led Blazers have.

 

As maxiep illustrates, for some it was definitely about the character. But I think for most people, in pretty much all fan bases, it's all about the winning. If a team is winning, a lot will be forgiven. If the team is losing, whatever attributes the players have will be phrased in such a way as to villify it (too thuggish, too nice and soft, too passive, too selfish, etc).

In the end, fans don't tolerate losing. Some fans don't tolerate bad attitudes, but a fan base as a whole doesn't tolerate losing. No matter who's doing it.

 

If that 2000 team would have beat the Lakers like they were supposed to and went on to win the championship would people look back and say that team was full of a bunch of thugs? Nobody would care, they would look back and think what a great and loaded team that was.

 

True, not many cared about the Blazers "thugginess" until they started losing, then, it was just like the iceing on the cake. God, why'd you have to bring up 2000 again. That's what this whole franchise is about, near misses and draft day blunders.

 

My mother and my best friend's mother in law bath turned off the Blazers because of the character issues, and while my mother had tuned by in, my best friend's mother-in-law still holds a grudge.

Not everyone is all about winning.

 

Character apparently changes the price of admission for some people, so to speak: a bad boy team in a good boy town needs to win a whole bunch more to become unimpeachable than a good boy team in a good boy town. Some people think that's pathetic, that people could like a bad team so much. Whatever.

 

Show of hands; how many people will refuse to watch a movie/tv show because one of the actors has a criminal past/drug problem?

 

And this ties into the other thread about whether sports is just entertainment or if it's also tribal pride. The teams are set up to explicitly represent a city or state, after all, whereas an actor is not.

I won't watch any movie Darius Miles has been in... but I think that's a cop-out.

 

Two words:

ANCIENT HISTORY

Let it die.

 

or for that matter don't fondly recall the Blazers lone championship because their best player was a known pot/acid head and their leading scorer got in a lot of fights on the court?

My contention has always been that the guys from the "Jailblazer" era were probably not all that different then current or past Blazer teams or NBA players in general. A couple of their top players turned a cold shoulder to the tabloid slimeballs from the O and were derided on a daily basis because it. The O's constant vitriol was picked up by the national media as the story largely because the last thing they want to do is to try to build up a ratings killer from way out west... much better to have Portland as the bad guys and promote the great guy Lakers. But the fact of the matter is that Portland was drawing about 20,000 paying fans per game throughout the Sheed-Pip-Sabas Blazers and all of 5 people showed up to the protest the Jailblazers in that flop of a rally.

it depresses me that Quick is still on the beat... we deserve better

STOMP

 

That's a very good point. Thanks for the perspective on that.

 

Well, I just found it funny because as the team started to sink below .500, many fans claimed they did not support the team because of the thugs, but as the thugs were traded away, none of those fans came back. They didn't start to show support until we got Roy and Aldridge, and even then it wasn't until we drafted Oden that most fans came rushing back into the fray.

 

Those were bandwagoners. There's a lot of them around every team. But as a long time fan, I was still embarrassed and still had to come up with reasons to support the late 01/02 team and the entire 02/03 team. It was not fun; I had decided to enjoy my team being the bad guys, but it wasn't easy, and it didn't last.

I had more fun after the team was blown up and not playing for keeps, just running the young guys, than I'd had the seasons before it. I vividly remember the Telfair-Ha team beating the Lakers, and being fucking ecstatic about it. It was a lot of fun.

Speaking of, I'll go look for it online, but there are studies of happiness around sports teams that say fans of bad teams are overall happier than fans of good teams (though fans of great teams are the happiest). Why? Expectations. When you're a bad team, the expectations are very low, and wins are a happy surprise. When you're a good team, you expect to win most games, and when you lose, it's awful. Since bad feelings are many times stronger than good feelings in the brain (another neurological study), it goes without saying that a season full of wins can be ruined by four untimely losses at the end.

So there you go. Perhaps a zen approach to the Blazers is in order: do not want, and what you receive will always be a pleasant surprise.