We are 2nd in the league with 240 games missed FAMS! Interesting read! http://www.basketballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=1631
If you could count Pendergraph, we would be number one! Oh, thats a bad thing..Yeah, it stinks, but it is what it is. Some day a season ending injury will be a cause of alarm, rather thann a matter of our day to day operations.
man we have had a run of bad luck for a couple of years here that any other team would have just relocated by now
Roy's stats say he's played 44 games this year, but we'd have a much better record if he'd never suited up at all.
Oh, it is definitely true and it is definitely depressing. Our first 19 games we went .421 as we tried to get Roy going. We lost to New Orleans twice, Utah, New Jersey, Philly, Washington--some pretty mediocre teams. By far the worst stretch of the season. Roy has done nothing since then to make up for that. All season we've been digging ourselves out of that early hole. We'd have a lock on the 5th seed right now if we'd only played those early games at the same .627 pace we've had for the rest of the year.
You don't really believe we would have the 5th seed wrapped up had Roy NOT played all season, do you?
i guess i really dont see the benefit of having a "lock" on the 5th seed as opposed to 6th-8th, im not afraid of any of these teams 1-4
Sadly, yes I really do. This team wasted a lot of time searching for answers with Roy early on. It was a major distraction. Somewhat similar to the whole Carmello fiasco in Denver, although this was about injury and not a guy trying to force his way out of town. But it's the same impact --a superstar who isn't fitting in. Aldridge only really took over this team when it became clear Roy was never going to be a star in this league again. That's when the team really adopted its true identity. I'm not happy about it. Roy has been one of my favorite Blazers of all time. But it's the truth.
I agree--there's not a huge difference in the likely playoff outcome for this team. But I like watching our team compete, building for the future. That first quarter of the season it seemed like it was sliding slowly backward into the lottery. Matthews sucked, Aldridge was flat, Roy was sucking.....it was really pretty rudderless. I'm so glad we finally got out of that. I'm pretty optimistic about the future. Maybe not ecstatic, but certainly more enthusiastic than I was at any point in November. There have been three phases to this season: 1. Roy sucking, and dragging everyone down with him 2. Aldridge emerging as a dominant player, with Matthews more than living up to his contract 3. Integrating Gerald Wallace without losing everything Batum brings to the table. I'm pretty cool with where we are now.
yeah, there was a dark cloud over the team this november/december for sure, and i do like where we are now...just amazing to think that we would be where we are without roy and oden, whom i thought were our only hope to be a good team
Take arguably the 2 best players off of EVERY roster in the NBA and see how those team's seasons turn out.
I was thinking yesterday, this team has had an injury-riddled "franchise" center every decade of its existence.
Sabonis........ a "franchise" center! Fuck off with that! Maybe in the late 80's. He came to us washed up and injured. What he did for us was awesome, but once he came to us he was a long long way away from being considered a "franchise" center!
Sabonis had the highest PER of all the regular rotation guys in both years the team made the WCF. Even as a shell of his former self he was a franchise center, Fams. Learn the game. Post.
He played on shitty teams his first few years, big deal. I am as big a Sabonis fan as there is, but nobody with any knowledge of the game would have ever called him an NBA franchise center by the time he got over here. 90's franchise centers included Ewing, Shaq, Hakeem, David Robinson. Sabonis was nowhere near their level.
