Poll: Who do you blame for the Blazer current state of Affairs

Oh ffs you promised me you weren't going to post here for a while!

 

It was a solid 1+ week

 

Oden and Roy's knees. Pick any good team in the league and imagine them without two franchise-quality players. They'd be a similar mediocre mess. (Well, maybe not Miami if they still had LeBron, but that's just a testament to how great LeBron is.)

All I'm really hoping for at this point is for Batum to blow up. If he can mature into a star player, Portland has something of a path forward. (Well, another path besides hoping Oden makes a full recovery, which is a pretty slim hope.) It's a lot to hope for, I'll admit.

Without that, I'm afraid we may be in for many years of being the Garnett Timberwolves.

 

how can anyone still look at this situation and say injuries when the team knew about the injuries all along and rolled the dice anyways? hell, WE knew about the greater than normal injury risks that these two guys were going to be. and that was when we drafted them, to think they were going to get anything from either of those two guys this season, like nic said, was icing on the cake.

 

The injuries are old news. Oden has been injured since day one. Roy's knees crapped out what, two seasons before this season? It should have been a surprise to no one that Roy was not going to be serviceable this year.

 

If Batum blows up, the next logical step will be Aldridge suffering a knee injury and Batum having persistent foot problems that constantly limit his availability.

Then we'll be able to hope for Nolan Smith to blow up. Not literally. Hopefully.

 

They are indeed old news. Except that when a superstar's career unexpectedly ends during his peak years it creates a vacuum that takes several years to fill. We didn't get to trade him for parts. We just saw all that trade value blow away in a whiff of smoke. Yet unlike most teams that see that happen (see Cleveland post-Lebron) we haven't had bad enough showings to start yielding decent draft picks. Aldridge is just too good.

So yeah, there's a big void there, and we've known about it for a while. But just because a problem is a couple of years old doesn't make it illegitimate.

Without getting really lucky with mediocre-to-bad draft picks, or more heists like Gerald Wallace (and to a lesser extent Matthews), or an explosion in productivity by Batum and/or Oden, we're kind of stuck.

 

It is the law of the jungle, the Circle of Limbs.