Kind of an offshoot of my All Bench Team. This isn't The Best Players. It's a list of the team you could assemble of the Blazers who were relatively poorly utilized in Portland, but could have realistically worked out better with us if things had just been slightly different. They HAVE to have been Blazers, so no We'll Take Bowie references please. PG: Greg Anthony. I still feel like the biggest mistake Dunleavy and Whitsitt made was to put the keys in the hands of Damon Stoudamire. With so much creativity and talent on our roster, we didn't need a ball dominant, undersized, poor defense point guard. Anthony provided defense and shooting and let others do the hard work. He was our Derek Fisher, and we never used him as much as we could have. Every team we faced exploited the Mouse. I don't think he'd have had phenomenal stats, but we would have been a much better team with him getting starters minutes and Stoudamire scoring off the bench. SG: Brandon Roy. His knees only had so many miles on them. We knew that when we drafted him, and it's why he was available. I think there's a scenario where you play him more like Ginobili around 27mpg instead of 37mpg. You probably trade in three All Star appearances for maybe 3 or 4 more good seasons of play. Make him play some SF. Watching him, Dame and LMA go to work in Dame's early years would've been a lot of fun. I don't know--maybe you just can't do that to an NBA star without him losing his mind. But in my sliding doors reality it works. SF: Drazen Petrovic: He was technically a SG, but I couldn't leave him off. A year after leaving us he's putting up 22ppg on 58%TS. Ugh. If he hadn't died in a freakish car crash, he'd have been the OG Jermaine O'Neal. Which brings us to..... PF: Jermaine O'Neal. Oh man did we fuck this up. While we were dicking around with Detlef Shrempf and Shawn Kemp, we had a six time All Star sitting on the far end of the bench. He is the reason no Blazer 22 or under will ever be traded again. "We can't trade Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje. What if he's the next Jermaine O'Neal?!?!" C: Bill Walton. This was before my time. After the injury, he was never going to be THE Bill Walton again. But looking back I wish he'd spent his career in Portland. He loved the city, he's a fantastic personality, and I just think he'd have been a great bench center and locker room influence. I don't know the particulars on why he left, but it seems a real shame. He seems like a Dirk Nowitzki sort of presence that you just want to see retire with your team. Bench: Scottie Pippen This kind of ties into Greg Anthony, but I'd just like to highlight a single stat: Last year in Chicago: 24.4% USG Result: NBA Championship One year in Houston: 19.7% USG Result: Complete team meltdown So what do we do when we get Scottie? Let's do EXACTLY what Houston did, and let him touch the ball 19.6% of the time. It was so mind-meltingly stupid.
Rudy Fernandez is number 1 on my list in recent Blazer history. Both he and Sergio without Nate, in the current NBA would have been so electric. Rudy especially.
I think the whole Jermaine thing is overblown. People forget he DID get given minutes - and he was shit. The thing is, we had him when he was a skinny teen. Also, he obviously needed to be pampered. Isiah Thomas decided that he would make him the focus of the team and just do nothing but rain praise on him. We couldn't do that, because we had a bunch of other good players. Sometimes players just need to move on. Same with Zach Randolph: he would not have become the player he became if he hadn't bounced around the league and had to look at himself. Who knows how good Batum could've been for us if we played him like the French National Team did? But the thing is, we had Roy. And then we had Dame. So we couldn't give Batum that kind of role.
I agree that Randolph had to go on his journey in order to find himself as a player and a person. I'm really happy with how his career ended. I loved that guy the first couple years we had him, and I loved him in Memphis. I disagree about Jermaine, though. You might have a point if he were 25. But he was 21 when we traded him. I think you could have brought him off the bench for a couple more years as he matured, and as Sabas broke down and some of the older guys' contracts expired, it would become obvious that he was the future in another year or two. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind Jermaine and Sheed could have co-existed as a front court tandem. Dale Davis gave us 7/7 in 26 minutes the year after we dumped Jermaine. I have no doubt we could have got that productivity out of O'Neal, given that he put up 13/10 in 32mpg in Indiana.
Jermaine O'Neal seemed to lose the confidence of the front office when he got killed by Shaq. But what did they expect from a skinny, inexperienced teen up against one of the greatest physical forces of nature in NBA history? I don't think Jermaine needed "pampering," I think he just needed a reasonable development path. Most prep-to-pro players (basically aside from LeBron James and Moses Malone) needed that. Whitsitt viewed the Blazers as right on the cusp of a title and judged that Jermaine, if he couldn't match up with Shaq, couldn't be a part of that. He might have been right about that, but that meant selling very low on talent. And, in that case, why draft him in the first place? There was never a chance that Jermaine, with his body type at the time, could match up with Shaq in his first few seasons.
I agree with you that this is the biggest mistake Dunleavy and Whitsitt made. Pippen was always their best quarterback (on both sides of the ball, really)--letting him play point forward and not trying to empower Stoudamire as the lead guard would have improved the team immensely. I think they got too locked into traditional roles--that the point guard is the controller of the offense. They would have been better off with a couple of three-and-D guards (in an era where "three-and-D players" weren't more expensive than diamond mines), Pippen directing flow and Wallace as the lead offensive weapon. Sabonis offered more and better play-making chops than Stoudamire.
Don't forget Amare. Agreed that we should've (a) not traded Jermaine for Davis, and (b) not traded Brian for Kemp. Just let Brian go in FA and open up minutes. I don't think Jermaine would've become the player he did in Indy, but he might've improved. And we wouldn't've been saddled with underwhelming Davis and overinflated Kemp. Trader Bob had to live up to his nickname.
Here's my "sliding doors" player: Alvin Williams. We were 9-1 with him starting and then we traded him for Mighty Mouse. He went on to become Mr. Raptor. He would've been ideal on those Pippen teams - there would've been no need for us to give him the ball like Stoudamire (because basically, unless Damon was scoring, what was the point of him?) and he was big enough to guard SGs. So Pippen would've been the high-usage PG he should've been and Williams would've been a versatile cog.
That's definitely true. But we traded Jerm for Davis, so I just swapped in Dale's numbers and minutes. If you do absolutely nothing but give every minute Dale Davis played to Jermaine O'Neal, we are no worse off that year and light years better every year after.
Oh man, that's a really good one. As a bonus, the guy averaged $4m/year over a 10 year career. Super cheap, which leaves you with all kinds of financial flexibility. Damon Stoudamire made stole $12m/year for most of his Blazers career. 20 years later, that is still more than anyone would pay for a 5'10 point guard with no defense, a selfish rep, multiple drug busts, and a 15PER. People don't hate Damon Stoudamire enough. I've tried to fix that every time I can.
This is absolutely true, and absolutely baffling. Pippen literally just won 6 championships being the team quarterback. Why the fuck do you trust somebody else with that job? I can understand Oden over Durant. I can even see how in the right light maybe Sam Bowie made sense in the era of dominant centers. Those were mistakes that happened in a single night that we had to live with forever. Whitisitt and Dunleavy made this choice, night after night, for literally years. It's one thing to fuck up--everybody does that. It's fucking up day after day after day for so goddamned long.... I got depressed about Roy, Oden and Nurkic. That stuff sucked. But everything about Damon Stoudamire is the only Blazers thing that truly enraged me. And jesus, I'm enraged right now goddammit.
@mook next needs the be the All- Basement team. Led the way with none other https://www.blazersedge.com/2019/3/...in-is-now-age-33-and-still-plays-professional
